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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

The Emergence of
Neuroscience and the
German Novel
Poetics of the Brain

Sonja Boos
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK

Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

Jessica Howell
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting series
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 Sonja Boos

The Emergence of
Neuroscience and the
German Novel
Poetics of the Brain
Sonja Boos
Department of German and Scandinavian
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR, USA

ISSN 2634-6435     ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-030-82815-8    ISBN 978-3-030-82816-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5

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 For Dora, who saved me
For Britton, who anchored my soul
And Colette, who completed us
The members of the faculty in German and Scandinavian at the University
of Oregon grieve for their colleague and friend Sonja Boos, who succumbed
to cancer just as this book was being readied for press. She was forty-eight.
Her courage and calm in the face of her illness gave us strength as we
watched its advance. We hold her memory dear, just as we cherish the
friendship of her husband, Britton, and two daughters, Dora and Colette.
 Preface

A classic nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, Adalbert Stifter’s bourgeois

realist novel Indian Summer (Der Nachsommer, 1857) depicts the pro-
cess of the main character Heinrich Drendorf’s maturation, first in his
father’s regimented household and subsequently under the tutelage of the
enigmatic Freiherr von Risach, who becomes a mentor to Heinrich.1 Von
Risach’s almost fairy-tale-like residence, the so-called Rosenhaus, is the
center of a methodically ordered world devoted to science, artisan crafts,
and gardening, among other things. The master of the house imposes an
unyielding hierarchical and serial order to his sophisticated collections,
making his estate the object of scrupulous museal preservation. Heinrich
is attracted to von Risach and his estate, for he senses a unity between the
man and his dwelling, an integrity and harmony that derives from his men-
tor’s targeted search and acquisition of unique objects that form a greater
appreciation and deeper understanding when synergistically combined
with other similar items. Heinrich is deeply impressed by both the ideo-
logical and economical value of von Risach’s possessions. But as the reader
follows Heinrich, whom von Risach escorts from one room to another,
pontificating on the artful inlay of yet another cabinet, she may begin to
wonder why and if the lengthy descriptions of refined objects and exotic
plants are poetically warranted. Where do we draw the line between

1
Adalbert Stifter, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 10 vols., ed.
Wolfgang Frühwald and Alfred Doppler (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982), Vol. 4. “Der
Nachsommer.” Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer, trans. Wendell W. Frye (New York:
P. Lang, 1985).

vii
viii PREFACE

mimetic representation, realistic verisimilitude, and poetic excess? And

how does this line affect how we perceive the distinction between collect-
ing—either for art’s sake, or as a uniquely modern way of interacting with
material culture—and pathological hoarding?2
This is hardly a problem of diagnostic reasoning. To claim that Stifter
suffered from collector’s mania (Sammelsucht) would mean to mistake the
work of art for some alleged causes that brought it to existence. While
critics agree that there is a tension in Stifter’s prose between a façade of
emotional restraint and moderation that barely conceals an underlying
darker passion or simmering obsession, there is little purpose in diagnos-
ing von Risach as if he were a real person.3 Although a strain of manic
behavior is present in Indian Summer and other works by Stifter on the
level of its characters’ behaviors, any such attempt would fallaciously use a
medical register of knowledge to draw conclusions about fictional bodies.
Rather, the question of hoarding is significant with respect to poetic form,
as it determines the organization and function of the novel’s narrative ele-
ments. Stifter’s Indian Summer creatively conveys the condition of obses-
sive collecting through its narrative structure, by thematically and textually
replacing action with stasis, desire with order, and nature with ritual.
While the novel makes a pathological form of collecting legible at the
level of storytelling, the scientific community of Stifter’s era had yet to
recognize it as a peculiar form of psychopathology. This is not to deny that
collector’s mania was already on the horizon as an object of scientific study
at the time and that it in fact existed all along, independently of its discov-
ery and codification.4 One commentator of the period thus noted a new
surge of medical interest in how an “innocent and useful passion”
(“unschuldige und nützliche Liebhaberei”) for objects can transform into
a pathological form of “collection addiction, collection passion, collection

2
Emile Durkheim, Suicide, ed. George Simpson, trans. John A. Spaulding and George
Simpson (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1951), 247–249.
3
See on this Claudia Öhlschläger, “Ethik Kleiner Dinge. Adalbert Stifter, Francis Ponge,
W.G. Sebald,” Weimarer Beiträge 62.3 (2016): 325–345. Other critics who have associated
Stifter’s idiosyncratic style with obsession, mania, and compulsive inclinations include Georg
Kaiser, Elizabeth Strowick, Helena Ragg-Kirkby, and Theodor W. Adorno, who notes:
“Stifter erlag dieser Obsession des Sammelns, die spätestens seit den Feldblumen ein poet-
ologisches Prinzip seiner Texte bildete, mit Bewusstsein.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Über
epische Naivität,” Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), 37.
4
See on this Daniel Lord Smail, “Neurohistory in Action: Hoarding and the Human
Past,” Isis 105, 1 (2014): 101.
 PREFACE ix

mania” (“Sammelsucht, Sammelleidenschaft, Sammelwuth”).5 Yet it will

take decades for psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and
Erich Fromm (1900–1980) to suggest an etiology of what is today defined
as hoarding disorder.6 Through its manic description of tedious descriptive
detail, Stifter’s novel gives concrete narrative shape and visible form to a
medical phenomenon that was not yet articulated scientifically. Prefiguring
a scientific discovery even without fully understanding it, Indian Summer
renders the disorder visible and knowable to the reader.
No less notably, the novel presciently detaches the question of hoarding
from the question of value and meaning. Risach’s things aren’t superflu-
ous—at least not to him. Indian Summer knows that value must be under-
stood through the eyes of the hoarder. The novel foreshadows our
present-day understanding that obsessive collecting is less about acquisi-
tion than it is about filling emptiness—not the existential emptiness of a life
without meaning that has been evoked by other commentators, but more
concretely and more precisely: the emptiness of a life lived in solitude.7 As
the “doctor” advises Tiburius, the Waldsteig’s protagonist, who is unam-
biguously portrayed as a compulsive hoarder: “You must marry, but before
that you must go to a spa and find your wife.”8 This insight into the link
between loneliness and hoarding has only recently reached the scientific
community. It is significant, then, that loneliness pervades the lives of all
the main characters in Indian Summer: Heinrich as a young boy is ill-at-­
ease in society, his father is a solitary figure, Roland—the artist—has
5
K. Back, “Ansprache,” Organ für Autographensammler und Autographenhändler 1, 2
(1859): 18.
6
The DSM-5 defines hoarding disorder as “persistent difficulty discarding or parting with
possessions, regardless of their actual value.” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders: DSM–5 (Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric Association, 2013). In the early
1900s, Sigmund Freud conceptualized hoarding behaviors as part of an anal-retentive per-
sonality that was characterized as miserly and overcontrolling of one’s environment. Sigmund
Freud, “Character and Anal Eroticism,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press,
1959), Vol. 9: “Jensens ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works (1906–1908),” 169–175. Erich Fromm
defined hoarding orientation as a “nonproductive character type” marked by compulsive
cleanliness and an obsessive need to save material possessions and emotional experiences.
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (New York: Henry
Holt, 1947), 65–67.
7
See Brigid Haines, Dialogue and Narrative Design in the Works of Adalbert Stifter
(London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1991), 4.
8
Adalbert Stifter, Brigitta, with Abdias, Limestone, and The Forest Path, trans. Helen
Watanabe-O’Kelly (London: Angel Books, 1990), 157.
x PREFACE

withdrawn from worldly society, and von Risach lives in relative seclusion.9
And this knowledge is not restricted to this particular novel either. As
Margaret Gump notes, Risach’s isolation “recalls the loneliness of Georg
in Der Waldgänger, of Jodok in Die Narrenburg, or Hugo in Das alte
Siegel, of the uncle in Der Hagestolz. All the people in these stories are
lonely men, whom fate, at the very best, grants a brief respite from their
isolation.”10 In Stifter’s narratives, collecting and hoarding figure as com-
pensatory behaviors that are overcome through interpersonal
relationships.
That Stifter’s writings firmly establish the link between the obsessive
need for hoarding and the hoarder’s lack of personal contact and close
relationships—and that they do so one and a half centuries before modern-­
era neuroscience reaches the same tentative conclusion—provided the ini-
tial rationale for this book.11 Other examples for German-language novels
anticipating neuroscientific writings were not hard to come by. The liter-
ary works included in this study are not anomalies but are representative
of, and typical for, the authors and their epochs. In the case of Stifter and
Kafka, neurological problems (hoarding and body schema disorder) can
be traced across many of the authors’ works. A degree of obsession with
symmetry is present in each of Keller’s novellas. A different approach
would be to map a neurological problem across the writings of a range of
different authors. For instance, the chapter on memory in Fontane could
be productively expanded by including the novelists who are at the center
of Frauke Berndt’s study of anamnesis in Moritz, Keller, and Raabe.12
Figures of the double could be mapped across the works of Hoffmann,
Storm, and Kleist, in addition to Jean Paul. Taken as a whole, the case

9
See on this Christine Oertel Sjogren, “Isolation and Death in Stifter’s Nachsommer,”
PMLA 80, 3 (1965): 254–258.
10
Margaret Gump, Adalbert Stifter (Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1974), 68.
11
A 2012 neuroscientific study investigating the neural basis of hoarding disorder suggests
that hoarders’ decisions about possessions are hampered by abnormal activity in brain regions
used to identify the emotional significance of things. A 2018 follow-up study assigns great
significance to the emotional attachment that individuals place on possessions as a way of
compensating for a lack of emotional warmth experienced in their early years: “Recollections
about the lack of emotional warmth experienced by participants with Hoarding Disorder
distinguished them from those with anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and healthy par-
ticipants.” https://neurosciencenews.com/compulsive-hoarding-disorder-9038/
12
Frauke Berndt, Anamnesis. Studien zur Topik der Erinnerung in der erzählenden
Literatur zwischen 1800 und 1900 (Moritz, Keller, Raabe) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer
Verlag, 1999).
 Preface  xi

studies serve to illustrate particular perspectives that are informed by a

rather small proportion of the large body of literature available. They offer
an entry into a topic that may evolve into a useful conceptual framework
for a new theory of the German novel. At the very least, this study is
intended to provide insight and inspiration to other scholars interested in
the historical evolution of the form of the novel against the backdrop of
neuroscientific discovery, and more broadly, those working to delineate
the rich and complex history of literature’s entwinement with science and
the production of medical knowledge.

Eugene, OR, USA Sonja Boos

 Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support from Oberlin

College’s Department of German Studies and from the University of
Oregon’s Department of German and Scandinavian, the Oregon
Humanities Center (OHC), the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), and
the Office of the Provost.
Thanks to the members of the nineteenth-century literary and visual
cultures research interest group: Nina Amstutz, Mayra Bottaro, Cory
Browning, and Mai-Lin Cheng. Thank you also to Kenneth Calhoon,
Jocelyn Holland, Sarah Pourciau, and Tobias Wilke for providing valuable
feedback in the process.

xiii
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Neuroscience   7
Chapter Outline  14

2 Dissecting the Subject: Brain Localization in The

Nightwatches of Bonaventura 21
Beginnings  24
The Organ of the Soul  26
Craniology  37

3 Fiction’s Scientific Double: Hallucinations in Jean Paul’s

Siebenkäs 47
Phantasms  50
Case Histories  58
The Figure of the Double  62
Unthought  67

4 A Tale from the Right Hemisphere: Amusia and Aphasia in

Franz Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician 71
Amusia  73
Absolute Music  83
Realism  89
Cerebral Hemispheres  95

xv
xvi Contents

5 Symmetry as Narrative Structure: OCD in Gottfried

Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet101
Monomania 105
An Obsessive Idea 110
Symmetry 116
Pedophilia 122

6 Writing Against Forgetting: Korsakoff’s Syndrome in

Theodor Fontane’s On Tangled Paths129
Memory Recuperation 130
Amnesia 135
Pseudo-reminiscences 143
Condensation 150

7 Allegory, Modernity, Learning to See: Cytoarchitectonics in

Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge157
Scientizing Medicine 164
Autopsy of the Soul 169
Brain Ablation 176

8 Reading Gestures: Body Schema Disorder and

Schizophrenia in Franz Kafka’s Prose183
The Body Schema 189
Animals 195
Humans 202
Schizophrenia 208

Afterword213

Bibliography219

Index245
 List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Korbinian Brodmann (left) working at the Oscar Vogt Institute,
Berlin. Photograph. Korbinian-Brodmann-Museum Hohenfels 178
Fig. 7.2 Korbinian Brodmann, Medial Surface of the Right Hemisphere
[possibly from a Flying Fox (Pterobus Edwardsi)], Drawing.
Korbinian-Brodmann-Museum Hohenfels 179

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This study attempts to revise the critical tradition that has long viewed
nineteenth-century German narrative as symptomatic of an “inward turn”
aligned with the psychological focus of Romanticism. This tradition pro-
vides the foil against which Poetics of the Brain seeks to reinterpret key
works of fiction with respect to the nascent discipline of neuroscience. In
pairing works by Klingemann, Jean Paul, Grillparzer, Keller, Fontane,
Rilke, and Kafka with contemporary writings on the nervous system and
cognitive function, the study not only investigates the specific cultural
conditions that enabled neuroscience to emerge within the German-­
speaking world but also speculates as to the role that literature might have
played in its emergence.
The idea that the Romantics discovered the unconscious is a common
trope in literary criticism.1 A modern theory of the psyche is broadly pre-
sumed to have emerged at the threshold of the nineteenth century in
Germany. It was the brainchild of the post-Kantian philosopher
F. W. J. Schelling and the Romantic poets Friedrich Schlegel, J. W. Ritter,
and Novalis, according to literary theorists, who unearthed the “psyche”

1
See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of
Dynamic Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 199–204.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel,
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_1
2 S. BOOS

or “soul” (Seele) as the mind’s inner medium.2 The Romantics’ fascination

with the foreign and the exotic animated a slew of experimental investiga-
tions that shed light on the mind’s interior processes.3 Literary theorists
concede that this kind of secular research into the self was not without
precedent. It carried on a tradition of inwardness that was already a hall-
mark of the Bildungsroman as it emerged in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century. The classic German genre was, after all, plotted with the
help of the new psychologies, such as Karl Philipp Moritz’ Magazine for
Empirical Psychology (Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde) and Johann
Christian Reil and Johann Christoph Hoffbauer’s Contributions to the
Advancement of Mental Therapeutics (Beyträge zur Beförderung einer
Curmethode auf psychischem Wege). Neither did this “inward turn of
narrative” end with the Romantic period.4 It found its logical continua-
tion in the distinctive internalization of the Poetic Realist novel whose
major representatives, Theodor Storm, Gottfried Keller, Conrad Ferdinand
Meyer, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Fontane, relegated the self to an
idealized inner landscape that would take precedence over concrete and
material reality. The intensified inwardness of the Enlightenment’s psy-
chological novel and the aestheticizing solipsism of the Romantics became
the heritage of German realism. According to this familiar account, poetic
inwardness, in its three distinct literary-historical iterations, reveals a ten-
dency toward withdrawal that is uniquely German in its main characteris-
tic. More than its European counterparts, the German novel is inherently
engrossed with the personal and interior life of a highly scrutinized psy-
chological subject.
Poetics of the Brain revises this dominant narrative about the distinctive
psychological inwardness and introspective depth of the German novel by
reinterpreting the novel’s development from the perspective of the nascent
discipline of neuroscience rather than psychology. Neuroscience is the sci-
entific study of the brain and the nervous system and their impact on
behavior and cognitive function. As was the case with psychology and
psychiatry, its emergence was contemporary with the rise of the German
novel. This was a new science that, just as psychology and psychiatry,
2
See Matt Ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth the
Modern Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
3
J. C. Reil’s coinage of psychotherapie, Carl Moritz’ Magazine for Empirical Psychology and
many other similar initiatives.
4
Erich Kahler, The Inward Turn of Narrative, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1958).
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

had yet to earn the faith and respect of the medical community. This study
poses the question: How did this rapidly evolving field emerge in the con-
text of nineteenth-century cultural practices and what were the conditions
for its emergence in the German-speaking world specifically? Where did
neuroscience begin and how did it broaden in scope? And most crucially,
to what degree did it owe its existence to literature?
Various studies acknowledge that literary and medico-scientific prac-
tices have long been mutually constitutive. But neuroscience is an inher-
ently materialist science that entails an overall shift of focus from the mind
(or psyche, or soul) to the material brain as the processor of experience. If
German literature is as preoccupied with the brain and the nervous system
as it is with the mind’s psychological functions, then our historiography of
the novel needs radical revision. Placed within the paradigmatic realm of
neuroscience, German novels seem to initiate less an inward journey that
leads to the realization of radical subjectivity than a making visible, a literal
bringing to the surface of the organic basis of cognition and behavior.
Beyond psychologizing the body, this literature reads the body in the full-
ness of its physicality, as the irreducible site of material practice. It epito-
mizes a literary tradition that conceives of the relationship between fiction
and the body as one that is determined not by the transformation of mate-
rial into ideas, but by embodied fictional imagination, a literary tradition
that, as Peter Boxell suggests, “sees the novel as the art form that is the
most attentive to the material weight of the body, rather than that in which
the body tends to disappear.”5
How does a novel describe the experience of living inside a body and
how does it represent the cerebral functions that organize our experience?
How does a narrative depict the idiosyncratic processes of cognition and
behavior as facilitated by the human nervous system? What exactly does
literature know about brain anatomy? Poetics of the Brain argues that
German novels of the nineteenth century render nonliterary and specifi-
cally neuroscientific knowledge through literary form by way of structur-
ally embodying the forms it is ostensibly describing. In some cases, certain
aspects of brain function and, no less importantly, malfunction, are pre-
sented allegorically through narrative or rhetorical features. For instance,
The Nightwatches of Bonaventura (Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura,
1804) imitates and exposes as flawed modularistic views of the brain, a
critique that is conveyed through the work’s episodic structure. Franz

5
Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 77.
4 S. BOOS

Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician (Der arme Spielmann, 1848) pushes back
against emerging theories of hemispheric lateralization through conspicu-
ous shifts in narrative perspective. Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of
Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,
1910) issues a critique of neuroanatomy and the practice of brain ablation
through the employment of the rhetorical device of allegory. In other
examples, it is the malfunctioning of the brain that is embodied through
idiosyncratic forms of textual dysfunction. Gottfried Keller’s A Village
Romeo and Juliet (Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, 1856/76) conveys
the priority of intrusive thoughts in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
through the textual device of symmetry, while Theodor Fontane’s On
Tangled Paths (Irrungen, Wirrungen, 1887/1888) self-referentially prob-
lematizes the neurological basis of long- and short-term memory loss by
juxtaposing two complementary forms of forgetting.
The following discussion is not limited to an analysis of literary repre-
sentations of proto-neuroscientific themes or motives. Going beyond a
mere topical treatment of scientific subjects in literary narratives, Poetics of
the Brain demonstrates that the evolution of the German novel’s textual
norms and conventions correlates with the formation of a neuroscientific
discourse within the framework of scientific thought. The study takes on
the largely unexplored task of explaining how the German novel’s poetic
properties anticipated, assisted, intensified, and disrupted the medical
articulation of neuroscientific concepts. It argues that the literary depic-
tions of cerebral function in a set of literary works often predate their
articulation within the scientific field of neuroscience. With the exception
of The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, the novels and novellas discussed in
this study foreshadow, rather than reflect, major breakthroughs in the sci-
entific understanding of brain function and development. They formulate
various kinds of brain pathologies avant la lettre, thereby questioning the
dichotomous categories through which we characterize scientific versus
humanistic inquiry, empirical reasoning versus artistic practice, or specula-
tive versus experimental methods.
Poetics of the Brain conceives of the relationship between literature and
neuroscience as a matter less of intellectual or creative influence than of
convergence, which is more subtle and complex. Rather than distinguish-
ing between theory and practice, or science and literature, this study takes
these divergent forms of intellectual engagement to be interconnected.
Their relationship is best described as a complex system of transferences
resembling what Gilles Deleuze once defined with respect to the
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

interaction between art and theory as “a system of relays within a larger

sphere, within a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and
practical.”6 The premise of convergence implies that literature can inde-
pendently develop theoretical knowledge and that it can arrive at similar
conclusions as early modern neuroscience, making these conclusions visi-
ble through narrative structure and form. It suggests that the textual logic
of literature plays a significant role in the scientific study of thinking, creat-
ing art, and acting in life. Authors as diverse as Theodor Fontane, Franz
Grillparzer, Franz Kafka, Gottfried Keller, August Klingemann, Jean Paul,
and Rainer Maria Rilke not only thematized the mysteries of cognition,
imagination, and memory in their narrative prose, but effectively antici-
pated neuroscientific insights by employing them as structuring models.
Crucially, the literary production of medico-scientific knowledge is not
restricted to the works of authors who received medical training and
whose work emerged from observations made in clinical practice.7 Instead
of focusing on the many doctor-writers in the German tradition—Georg
Büchner, Arthur Schnitzler, Alfred Döblin, and Gottfried Benn promi-
nent among them—this study highlights authors whose works incorporate
an intuitive and implicit understanding of neuroscientific knowledge, one
that is not dependent on an explicit one-way knowledge transfer from
authoritative sources. What these lay examples reveal is that from its earli-
est beginnings, neuroscience is culturally embedded in the historical con-
text in which it is situated. Its expertise infiltrates and draws from all levels
of society and myriad areas of knowledge.
It follows that Poetics of the Brain reverses the expectation of cause and
effect underlying the current interdisciplinary fusion between cognitive
science and literary studies.8 Cognitive literary studies have produced a
wealth of new works theorizing the cognitive-evolutionary aspects of

6
Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and
Gilles Deleuze,” Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 206.
7
See Michael Worbs, Nervenkunst. Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der
Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1983).
8
While the school of “cognitive poetics” purportedly “account[s] for the relationship
between the structure of literary texts and their perceived effects,” it still applies cognitive
linguistics and psychology to literary texts, rather than vice versa. Reuven Tsur, Toward a
Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 1.
6 S. BOOS

reading fiction.9 For instance, they have argued that fiction prompts the
reader to get into the minds of characters and participate in a process of
perspective formation. Contemporary discussions of Theory of Mind
(ToM) in particular have helped delineate the strategies by which we con-
strue normative narratives, questioning, for instance, how the mind allows
us to attribute mental states to literary characters.10 This has led to an
improved understanding of the material workings of the brain during the
reading process. For instance, Emily Troscianko has dedicated a book-­
length study to the question of how, in Kafka’s prose, cognition serves as
the necessary mediator between the fictional worlds made available to the
reader on the one hand, and the operations in his or her embodied mind
on the other.11 Fritz Breithaupt, in his reading of Theodor Fontane’s Effi
Briest (Effie Briest, 1894/95), has identified the reader’s “sadistic empa-
thy” with a suffering character as a key motivation for reading literature.12
According to Breithaupt, this kind of paradoxically advocative and exploit-
ative empathy is the structural effect of an “implicated reader” who seeks
to prolong that which “enables his or her emotional involvement” and
“preserves his presence” in the novel.13 Ralph Müller, finally, takes a two-­
pronged approach to explaining the emotional effects of metaphors in
Rilke’s thing-poems (Dinggedichte). While he borrows cognitive poetics’
method of reconstructing the emotional experiences afforded by meta-
phors, he nevertheless pays close attention to the embeddedness of lan-
guage in discursive and generic traditions.14 By looking at literature as an
object of knowledge and by appealing to the cognitive and neurological
processes and mechanisms underlying affective reading, these interdisci-
plinary studies have provided new and insightful answers to the question
of how literary texts establish meaning.

9
The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015).
10
Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2006).
11
Emily Troscianko, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (New York: Routledge, 2014), 2.
12
Fritz Breithaupt, “Empathic Sadism: How Readers Get Implicated,” The Oxford
Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, 440–459.
13
Ibid., 453–454.
14
Ralph Müller, “Kognitive Poetik und Korpusstilistik. Ein Zugang zur Metaphorik bei
Rainer Maria Rilke,” Literatur und Kognition: Kognitive Poetik, ed. Martin Huber and
Simone Winko (Paderborn: Mentis, 2009), 203–217.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Poetics of the Brain represents a significant shift in the meaning and

focus of cognitive approaches to literary studies. Instead of applying con-
temporary developments in cognitive science to literary texts, it acknowl-
edges the need for work that examines the conceptual and practical
dimensions of literary knowledge within the context of the historical inter-
action between neuroscience and nineteenth-century prose literature.
Poetics of the Brain considers as crucial the under-examined historical links
between the development of brain research and neurology into the dis-
tinct academic discipline of neuroscience and the rise and transformation
of the modern novel. It argues that the form of the novel is particularly
suited to representing and enacting the mechanisms and architecture of
the human brain. Nineteenth-century novels capture the emergent scien-
tific fascination with the mysteries of cerebral function in the process of
artistic production. This has great implications for the future of brain
research as a scientific endeavor. The literary construction of cerebral and
cognitive functions and their figural representation within the literary text
itself invests science with metaphorical meaning. By amplifying and inter-
rogating scientific frames of reference, literature provides new horizons of
meaning in the production of medical knowledge.

Neuroscience
Today it is virtually impossible to read about human experience and behav-
ior in a context that would fail to invoke its cognitive underpinnings and
neuronal foundations. In recent years, the number of research reports pre-
sented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience has exploded.
Many of these new findings make their way into the popular press where
we learn about the actual and hypothetical possibilities suggested by new
brain and mind technologies. An expanding frontier of investigation thus
focuses on brain-scanning techniques that would use the brain as a portal
to thought, thereby enabling practices of “mind-reading” or even “mind
uploading.”15 It is also difficult to ignore new research that debunks free
will as an illusion and as a result casts doubt on our conceptual framework
15
See Sharon Darwish, “Will neuroscientists ever be able to read our minds?” Guardian,
April 9, 2015, accessed April 7, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/science/occams-
corner/2015/apr/09/will-neuroscientists-ever-be-able-to-read-our-minds, and Amy
Harmon, “The Neuroscience of Immortality. Mileposts on a Long and Uncharted Road,”
New York Times, September 12, 2015, accessed April 7, 2021, http://www.nytimes.com/
interactive/2015/09/03/us/13immortality-explainer.html
8 S. BOOS

for understanding selfhood and subjectivity.16 This is indeed the “era of

the brain supremacy,” as Kathleen Taylor defines our epoch, “in which we
are likely to gain precision control—and perhaps remote and non-invasive
control—of the human brain, and thus of human minds.”17
The current materialist paradigm of neuroscience, according to which
all mental processes are effects physically generated or organically condi-
tioned by the nervous system, finds its historical precedent in the proto-­
neuroscientific mindset of the nineteenth century. Inaugurated by the
work of Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) at the turn of the eighteenth
century, the emerging field of neuroscience was characterized by the sys-
tematic attempt to correlate brain structure with sensory, motor, and cog-
nitive function.18 Moving beyond mere morphological characterizations
of the brain, Gall for the first time aimed for an analysis of its functional
organization, and many European physiologists and anatomists followed
his example.19 The logical end of this line of inquiry was the claim that the
human mind was purely the result of bodily processes in the brain. It is
hardly surprising that Gall’s work met with considerable opposition from
political and religious authorities. As one commentator notes, “it was
viewed as implying materialism and determinism and denying the unity of
the mind (and soul) and the existence of free will.”20 The idea that the
thinking thing inside us might be a material brain rather than an immate-
rial soul challenged the widely accepted Cartesian mind/body dualism
positing the mind as a distinct, metaphysical entity.
The first neuroscientists explained the central nervous system in terms
of other disciplines because neuroscience was not yet recognized as a aca-
demic discipline in its own right. Neuroscience began when traditional,
anatomically and physiologically oriented brain research broadened in

16
See, for instance, Eliezer J. Sternberg, My Brain Made Me Do it: The Rise of Neuroscience
and the Threat to Moral Responsibility (New York: Prometheus Books, 2010).
17
Kathleen Taylor, The Brain Supremacy (blog). http://blog.oup.com/2012/11/the-
brain-supremacy/. Accessed April 7, 2021. See also K. Taylor, The Brain Supremacy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
18
According to Clarke and Jacyna, modern neuroscience was formed after 1800. Edwin
Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987).
19
See Olaf Breidbach, “The Origin and Development of the Neurosciences,” Theory and
Method in the Neurosciences, ed. Peter K. Machamer et al. (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2001).
20
Charles G. Gross, A Hole in the Head: More Tales in the History of Neuroscience
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 94.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

scope and became more interdisciplinary, bringing psychology and biol-

ogy together under the umbrella of a new discipline that would engage a
range of discourses covering a gamut of subjects: neurology, psychiatry,
psychology, neuroanatomy, and psychopathology. It is virtually impossible
to overstate the impact of this new paradigm on the educated general
populace of modern Europe.21 Popular reading materials were distributed
widely to the reading public, announcing in sometimes quite sensationalist
terms the epistemological and metaphysical consequences of this emerg-
ing field of research. Gall’s craniology thus indicated that “destiny lay in
the shape of one’s skull,” while Samuel Thomas von Soemmering’s ana-
tomical work on the cranial nerves announced the “discovery of the mate-
rial seat of the soul.”22 By the mid-nineteenth century, a number of basic
neuroscientific concepts still considered valid today had thus been estab-
lished. Paul Broca’s (1824–1880) epochal discovery of the speech produc-
tion center in the left frontal area of the brain led to the realization that
the two cerebral hemispheres were not identical.23 Building on Luigi
Galvani’s (1737–1798) discovery that nerves and muscles were electrically
excitable, Eduard Hitzig (1838–1907) and Gustav Fritsch (1838–1927)
demonstrated that the cerebral cortex responded to electrical stimulation
and that cortical localization pertained to more than just speech.24 In psy-
chopathology, the terms of the new materialist paradigm were set with
Wilhelm Griesinger’s (1817–1868) proclamation that “mental disease is

21
See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962) and The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
22
On the public debate that was incited by this discursive event see Friedrich Strack,
“Soemmerings Seelenorgan und die deutschen Dichter,” Frankfurt aber ist der Nabel dieser
Erde. Das Schicksal einer Generation der Goethezeit (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1983), 202. An 1805
article in the Europäische Aufseher thus mocks the idea that “the fate of every human is writ-
ten on his forehead, in his neck, or on the vertebra, or behind the ears.” (translation mine)
(“Das Schicksal jedes Menschen ist ihm an die Stirne, oder im Nacken, oder auf dem Wirbel,
oder hinter die Ohren geschrieben.”) Quoted in Sigrid Fehler-Klein, Die Schädellehre Franz
Joseph Galls in Literatur und Kritik des 19. Jahrhunderts. Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte einer med-
izinisch-biologisch begründeten Theorie der Physiognomie und Psychologie (Jena: Gustav Fischer
Verlag, 1990), 23.
23
Paul Broca, “Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé; suivies d’une
observation d’aphemie,” Bulletin de la Société Anatomique de Paris 6 (1861): 330–357.
24
Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig, “Über die elektrische Erregbarkeit des Großhirns,”
Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medizin 37 (1870): 300–332. Gustav
Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig, “On the Electrical Excitability of the Cerebrum,” Some Papers on
the Cerebral Cortex, trans. and ed. G. von Bonin (Springfield, MA: Thomas, 1960), 73–96.
10 S. BOOS

brain disease” (“Geisteskrankheit ist Gehirnkrankheit”).25 While the his-

tory of clinical neuroscience is replete with attempts to explain the biologi-
cal mechanisms underlying mental pathology, it was Griesinger’s work on
the role of brain lesions in mental disease that was to determine the prog-
ress of German systematic psychiatry for the next forty years, regardless of
the fact that no relationship had yet been established between brain
pathology and mental disorder.26 The biological explanation of mental
disorder became the prevailing neuroscientific paradigm of the nineteenth
century. It was further advanced by the eminent German neurologist
Oscar Vogt, who in the late 1890s declared that a thorough and compre-
hensive investigation of the brain’s anatomy and physiology would be one
of the most important tasks of science in the approaching twentieth cen-
tury.27 To Vogt’s mind, cerebral localization had provided repeated dem-
onstrations that mental diseases and cognitive irregularities had their
ultimate seat in the nervous system, which itself represented the apogee of
organic evolution.28 The centrality of the nervous system became an
accepted principle in physiological and medical discourse, culminating in
the idea that disturbances of the mind and behavior were caused by focal
brain pathology.
Encouraged by a range of seminal discoveries in the pioneering field of
neuroscience, physiologists and anatomists working in the nineteenth cen-
tury had little difficulty distancing their logic of inquiry from the theologi-
cal and metaphysical questions that had still constrained their predecessors’
search for truth. The academic elite and the general public were equally
captivated by their successes, which further increased confidence in new
experimental methods. At the same time, the form of the novel developed
to represent the kinds of figurations of cognition and psychopathology
that were being enthusiastically entertained by contemporary neuroscien-
tists. Viewing the human mind as the function of a material entity,

25
Wilhelm Griesinger, Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten (Stuttgart:
Krabbe, 1845). Wilhelm Griesinger, Mental Pathology and Therapeutics (New York: William
Wood, 1882). Quoted after Katja Günther, Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of
Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
26
See Oxford Textbook of Psychopathology, ed. Paul H. Blaney et al. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 23.
27
Fernando Vidal, “Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity,” History of the
Human Sciences 22.1 (2009): 7.
28
See Anne Stiles (ed.), “Introduction,” Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–23.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

nineteenth-century neuroscientists treated the human subject as a fallible

but ultimately predictable object of inquiry, while German novelists began
to explore the fluidity of subjectivity at the expense of constructing a tra-
ditional ethical subject. Physiological and subjective pathology became
not only the genre’s thematic focus but also its form, while a skeptical
attitude toward the presumption of a human subject began to structure
the novel itself. Authors ranging from Klingemann to Kafka explored indi-
vidual subjectivity in its multiple variants and permutations, but always
with an eye on its material basis. It is thus both in response to and as a
shaper of these new scientific perspectives that nineteenth-century novels
become ever more fascinated with representing and capturing the phe-
nomena of madness and genius, pathology and sanity, criminality and nor-
mality, as well as the fluidity of the boundaries between these
categories.29
While the development of the modern novel mirrors the upsurge of a
scientific interest in the brain, it would be wrong to view the literary pre-
occupation with cerebral (dys)function as a mere reactive impulse to the
latest intellectual stimulus from the scientific world. This is not to deny
that some of the most urgent discoveries in the brain sciences of the era
may have captivated the imagination of nineteenth-century German nov-
elists, illuminating in the process a number of literary theoretical questions
that have been notoriously tricky for literary theorists to tackle: What is
memory, and how does it correlate with other cognitive capacities? How
do imagination and creativity conspire to define temporal and spatial per-
ception? And how does hemispheric lateralization determine how we
experience reality? These questions became not only the novel’s thematic
focus but also came to determine its form, while a skeptical attitude toward
the presumption of a human subject began to structure the novel itself. In
that sense, the German novel also fulfills the function of preserving a level
of mystery and hermeneutic ambiguity in a world obsessed with the mate-
rialism of natural science. Literature stimulates critical reflection even
when it meets scientific innovation with suspicion and anxiety or when it
capitulates to the insight that the human mind can never be fully captured.

29
On the significance of psychology in modernist literature, see Judith Ryan, The Vanishing
Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), 6–7. See also Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from
Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 273–274.
12 S. BOOS

The textual and aesthetic experimentations associated with Romantic,

Poetic Realist, and high modernist German prose literature represent
symptomatic responses to experimental investigations conducted by con-
temporary neuroscientists and psychopathologists in the long nineteenth
century. Symptomatic because there are elements in these novels that con-
figure and construe unspoken scientific insight as symbolic of something
that remains concealed, thereby pointing to a latent content the text itself
cannot fully articulate. Indeed, brain research was just one of many scien-
tific topics that were problematized everywhere in nineteenth- and early-­
twentieth-­century literature, which in this context fulfilled its function as
the all-encompassing foundational meta-discourse in which the
Foucauldian epistemes of “rational” argument and “factual” scientific dis-
courses were embedded, and so could be reflected upon. Science, and in
particular neuroscience—a new discipline that had yet to come into being
and legitimize itself in the course of the nineteenth century—was (and still
is) subject to critique in literature. Whether explicitly or implicitly, litera-
ture competes for authority with the scientific discourses it anticipates,
inserting itself in the discussion of neurological phenomena and cerebral
functions.
It is a common trope in Western intellectual history to claim that sci-
ence is the authoritative discourse toward the less certain status of litera-
ture. Science informs literature, while literature merely reflects scientific
trends without significantly altering them. On the other end of the aca-
demic spectrum, the opposite claim has received sustained attention:
Literature reveals scientific knowledge we already have but do not know
we possess. It expands our humanistic self-understanding and alters the
cultural values attached to the scope and language of scientific inquiry. It
takes on a conceptual or even practical role in answering and raising scien-
tific questions. Poetics of the Brain contends that in the long nineteenth
century, knowledge about the human brain emerged at the margins or
even outside of the disciplinary boundaries demarcating what counted
(and arguably still counts) as the legitimate domains of science’s “privi-
leged” way of knowing. Following Michel Foucault, it understands knowl-
edge as a discursive formation that comprises a heterogeneous group of
textual and non-textual, literary and quotidian, technical and apocryphal
practices through which meaning is continually negotiated in relation to
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

structures of (political) power, (academic) authority, and (literary)

culture.30
German novelists often take the strong stance of participants rather
than observers, especially in the long nineteenth century when scientific
discoveries circulated widely and beyond specialized professional circles.31
It would be wrong to conceive of literature as a secondary response to sci-
ence, a realm that merely popularizes or critiques neuroscientific inquiry,
instead of a discourse that is constitutive of knowledge itself. This insight
applies as much to contemporary forms of cultural expression as it does to
nineteenth-century literature. As Barbara Stafford notes, visual and sen-
sory arts are

constitutive, not merely illustrative of basic mental operations such as intuit-

ing, inferring, associating, hallucinating, feeling arousal, and categoriz-
ing. … The role of culture is not just to stand outside, critiquing science,
nor is science’s position external and acting on culture, rather we are discov-
ering that at the most profound levels our separate investigations being to a
joint project. … Findings from neuroscience are putting pressure on vener-
able questions long held to be the property of cultural historians of every
stripe: the nature of the subject and intersubjective relationships, mimesis,
affect, the varieties of illusion, automaticity versus will, and the many shapes
of uncertainty.32

As a study of the relations between the humanities and the natural sci-
ences, Poetics of the Brain demonstrates that in the nineteenth century,

30
Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York:
Routledge, 1989).
31
See Anne Stiles, who writes: “A series of neurological experiments had a profound
impact on late-Victorian Gothic novels … in turn, these novels often influenced the direction
of future neurological research. This symbiotic relationship extends to matters of form and
content. Neurologists and authors shared a fascination for boundaries and their transgres-
sions, especially the evanescent mind–body divide and the limits of human free will. Explains
the surprising numbers of neurological references in the novels … novelists did not simply
accept but criticized the linear perspective of neurological science, and its rigid biological
determinism.” Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. See also Louise Henson et al., Culture
and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (London: Routledge, 2004).
32
Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press), 2.
14 S. BOOS

culture and knowledge remained entangled with one another and were
never split into “two cultures.”33

Chapter Outline
Poetics of the Brain is structured in three parts, which deal with Romantic,
Poetic Realist, and modernist German novels (as well as novellas and a few
short stories), respectively. In each chapter, a literary work is paired with a
neuroscientific discovery, usually one that occurred simultaneously but
independently, sometimes in separate corners of the German-speaking
world and beyond. When the Russian doctor Sergei Sergeievich Korsakoff
first provided an etiological description of what came to be called
Korsakoff’s syndrome in 1887, Berlin-based novelist Theodor Fontane was
working on final revisions of On Tangled Paths, a novella that firmly estab-
lishes the link between memory loss and alcoholism in Prussian society.
And when Czech psychiatrist Arnold Pick first diagnosed body schema dis-
order in 1908, Franz Kafka published his first in a long line of prose fic-
tions that vividly illustrate the kinds of body schema alterations that often
accompany ego regressions. There is also the case of a literary author
directly citing and effectively ridiculing the neuroscientific literature of his
era. August Klingemann’s The Nightwatches of Bonaventura lampoons
Viennese craniologist Franz Joseph Gall and Samuel Thomas von
Soemmering’s 1796 treatise On the Organ of the Soul. But even if some
literary texts make explicit references to neuroscientific research, the
objective of Poetics of the Brain is not to trace the actual reception of neu-
roscientific literature by literary authors or vice versa, or to draw conclu-
sions about who influenced whom and what direct impact one discursive
actor has had on another through a set of textual interventions or even
biographical interactions. Instead, this study takes a series of representa-
tive case studies to map more broadly how poetic practices have been
intrinsic to the production of neuroscientific knowledge. The hope is that
this will pave the way for a fuller analysis of the historical correlation of
literature and neuroscience in and beyond the nineteenth century. The
selected seven case studies highlight specificity as well as the applicability
to a wide range of materials, as they take up demonstrable—textual and
conceptual—correspondences between scientific writings and fictional

33
See John G. Fitch, The Poetry of Knowledge and the ‘Two Cultures’ (New York: Palgrave
McMillan, 2018).
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

texts to show that science and literature are indeed “interdependent

fields.”34 While the case studies do not provide literary analyses of scien-
tific writings, they will attend to specific institutional policies and practices
within the medical field and, whenever appropriate, inquire into the ques-
tion of how the scientific community refines its criteria, asserts its credibil-
ity, and counters the contingencies of scientific investigation. This will
help illuminate how and why the field of neuroscience was able to emerge
as a dominant medico-scientific discipline in the course of the nineteenth
century.
Taking its cue from an ironic reference to Samuel Thomas von
Soemmering and Franz Joseph Gall in Klingemann’s The Nightwatches of
Bonaventura, Chap. 2 looks at the theory and practice of brain localiza-
tion and its implications not just for the birth of modern neurosciences
but also for the Romantic novel’s idiosyncratic formal organization.
Conjuring chance rather than historical or moral purpose, the episodic
form of the Nightwatches illustrates the sporadic, non-processual view of
human cognition and behavior that lies at the center of Gall’s craniological
map of the brain, with its division of various cerebral functions into spe-
cialized domain-specific modules. The chapter also argues that the novel’s
protagonist both symbolizes and deconstructs Soemmering’s notion of an
“organ” of the soul. In his unstable and volatile state, “Kreuzgang”
uniquely embodies the nervous impulses that according to Soemmering
pass into the central nervous system in the form of movement.
In Chap. 3, a comparison of the structural parallels between Nicolai’s
rationalist inductive and Esquirol’s materialist theories of hallucinations
shows that hallucinations in the nineteenth century figure as a battle-
ground of scientific events and cultural forces, of empirical facts and con-
fabulated stories. This is because hallucinations are understood as both
material mental representations of nonexistent phenomena and, paradoxi-
cally, verifiable symptoms of delusional insanity. The chapter explores how
Esquirol’s work on hallucinations allowed the genre of the case study to
take hold within the field of neurology and become an invaluable tool in
the medicalization of imagination and fantasy. The purpose of this inquiry
is to trace the process by which hallucinations ceased to be the other of
science and instead became its literary counterpart. The second part of the
chapter shows that the inflationary use of the figure of the double in the

34
James J. Bono, “Making Knowledge: History, Literature, and the Poetics of Science,”
Isis 101, 3 (2010): 556.
16 S. BOOS

work of Jean Paul testifies to this muddling of the distinction between

factual and fictional writing, speculative philosophy, scientific reasoning,
and literary imagination. At the same time, Jean Paul’s eccentric and
sprawling novels emerge as a powerful response to science’s disciplining of
literature’s otherness and a veritable explosion of scientific knowledge.
The second part of the book continues to explore how the figuration of
modern empirical knowledge is intertwined with questions of literary
modes and narrative structures. Specifically, it locates objects of neurosci-
entific knowledge within the formal and generic conventions of a set of
novels and novellas by three German Poetic Realists: Franz Grillparzer,
Gottfried Keller, and Theodor Fontane. Chapter 4 analyses Grillparzer’s
novella The Poor Musician through the lens of the medical case study, a
genre of prose narrative that emerged contemporaneously with the litera-
ture of Poetic Realism. Both narrative modes assert an authoritative posi-
tion by virtue of providing an accurate representation of reality, thereby
projecting a very nineteenth-century way of looking at the empirical
world. The chapter argues that Grillparzer’s novella participates in the
formation of a neurological discourse on the status of music processing in
the brain, while also reflecting on the conditions of possibility for neuro-
science and literary texts to work together. Staging the emergence of com-
peting cognitive models for music processing through the insertion of a
diegetic narrative act and frequent shifts in narrative focalization, the
novella anticipates contemporary neurological debates on the links
between aphasia and amusia, and in particular August Knoblauch’s defini-
tion of tone-deafness and note-blindness. Moreover, the novella’s juxta-
position of different narrative planes provides a critical commentary on the
two functional modes of hemispheric activity scientists first began to notice
in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 4 submits that the hemispheric
lateralization of music and language as it is performed in the novella’s nar-
rative structure also has implications for the novel of Poetic Realism, a
literary articulation that is centrally concerned with the nature of knowl-
edge itself.
Chapter 5 continues the discussion of literature as a source of scientific
knowledge, but also as a critique of the historical contingencies of medical
experimentation. A close reading of Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet
demonstrates that the novella not only challenges Esquirol’s explanation
of monomania but effectively anticipates pioneering research on obsessive-­
compulsive disorder conducted by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Wilhelm
Griesinger, and Carl Westphal in Austria and Germany. This is because
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

Keller’s novella is organized according to rigid symmetrical patterns and

yet falls apart into two distinct parts, suggesting that it is structured by an
obsessive idea that results in a pathological obsession with symmetry. At the
same time, A Village Romeo and Juliet is actively engaged in negotiating
the terms and conditions of its own coming-into-being and survival as
literature in an age that was motivated by the desire to advance public
morality through scientific discovery. The chapter sheds light on the tex-
tual strategies by which the novella generates the appearance of normalcy
and propriety, while at the same time testing the public’s readiness to
assimilate and accept the wider applications of experimental
psychopathology.
If the bifurcated structure of Keller’s novella paradoxically reinforces
the novella’s inner coherence, the bipartite construction of Fontane’s On
Tangled Paths performs two complementary forms of forgetting that con-
nects the two parts of the story and conveys their deeper significance,
namely, its concern with the question of how memory and literature, as
mutually illuminating constituents of knowledge, can help make sense of
an ever-changing world. Memory in On Tangled Paths is depicted as a
process that is meaningful precisely because it is exposed to the vicissitudes
of modernity. Read as a commentary on the neuroscience of memory loss,
the novella exposes and displaces the instabilities of the Second German
Empire onto the latest findings of neurology. Mobilizing tropes of remem-
bering and forgetting, it anticipates Korsakoff’s groundbreaking distinc-
tion between anterograde and retrograde amnesia as well as his insight that
neuronal damage resulting from excessive alcohol consumption leads to
short- and long-term memory loss. Chapter 6 further argues that On
Tangled Paths itself engages in a process (and tests the limits) of memory
recuperation. This is because the novella is based on an elaborate form of
data processing, as its author Fontane painstakingly recorded visual and
verbal memory aids before the facts could leave his working memory. The
novella’s somewhat mundane genesis from a set of detailed notebooks is
consistent with the poetological program of Fontane’s late realist style in
that it self-referentially problematizes the neurological basis of forgetting.
The third part of Poetics of the Brain ventures into the contested terrain
of literary modernism. It examines the ways in which our understanding
and acceptance of neuroscientific knowledge is both facilitated and chal-
lenged by modernism’s break with discursive and generic conventions.
Chapter 7, thus, looks at a central allegory in Rilke’s The Notebooks of
Malte Laurids Brigge to show how the rhetorical mode of allegory serves
18 S. BOOS

to expose a conflict that split views of the human psyche at the turn of the
century. In the novel, Malte’s vision of a partially demolished Parisian
tenement building strips away the frailty and alienation of the modern
consciousness to convey a deeper connection between the poet, his textual
practice, and the medico-scientific practice of brain ablation. But Malte’s
allegorical mode of seeing also stands in stark contrast with the exacting
scientific gaze of the clinicians he goes to see at the Salpêtrière hospital. At
stake in Rilke’s novel are the terrors of electroshock therapy, the biopoliti-
cal mismanagement of corpses, and the practice of human autopsy, which
were all part of a move to ‘scientize’ the field of neuroanatomy in the
course of the nineteenth century. Read against the clash within the field of
neuroscience between experimental psychology, psychiatry, and neuro-
anatomy, Malte’s brief encounter with the medical profession highlights
the binarism between the biological-physiological and the metaphysical
realms. Opposed to the kind of neuroanatomy that was facilitated by new
technologies of brain ablation and increasingly sophisticated skills in
manipulating specimens, the novel addresses the complicated kinds of
interdependences between the soma and the anima. In that way, Poetics of
the Brain comes full circle back to Soemmering’s speculations on a cere-
bral seat of the soul.
Chapter 8, finally, uses body schema and body image disorder as well as
schizophrenia as a lens of reading the gestures of Kafka’s characters,
thereby showing that these conditions are symptomatic of a fractured
sense of self in modernism. Engaging with a range of Kafka’s human and
nonhuman figures, the chapter focuses on descriptions of bodily move-
ment that betray a sense of being out of sync with and within one’s own
body and one’s spatial environment as well as an imagination of one’s own
body that is mediated through its outside perception by others. Examples
drawn from Kafka’s novels and short stories show that bodies in Kafka
serve as the site of an interplay between a modernist poetics and early-­
twentieth-­century neuroscientific research into schizophrenia and body
schema disorder, a neuropathological condition that involves difficulties in
identifying body parts or their relative relations to one another. Hence,
the chapter understands Kafka’s bodies as bodies that can be mapped and
made predictable through their failing sensory-motor processes, even if
the latter are inflected by the symptoms of schizophrenia, which used to
be a poorly understood condition, mainly because of a perceived lack of
biological markers.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

To summarize, Poetics of the Brain is conceived as a series of case studies

that reveal how, in the context of a specific cultural and historical setting,
poetic imagination challenges and supplements scientific knowledge.
While the book does not offer a conclusive proposal for a general theory
of poetics, it does provide an account of the significance of a (neuro)
science-­oriented approach to understanding nineteenth-century German
narrative prose literature. The importance of studying the practice of lit-
erature with an eye on how it constructs new forms of knowledge about
the brain lies in the idea that there is something of a dialectical relationship
between neuroscience’s means of representing its emergent knowledge
and the figural, rhetorical operations within fictional texts.
 CHAPTER 2

Dissecting the Subject: Brain Localization

in The Nightwatches of Bonaventura

Finally, there is a reasoning soul in this machine; it has its principal

site in the brain, where it is like the fountaineer who must be at the
reservoir, whither all the pipes of the machine are extended, when he
wishes to start, stop, or in some way alter their actions.
—René Descartes

It is an ironic twist of German literary history that the novel’s rise to

dominant narrative form coincides with its nihilistic overturning
through a self-­consciously subversive example of the genre. Published
anonymously in 1804 under the eponymous pseudonym, The
Nightwatches of Bonaventura (Nachtwachen von Bonaventura) presents
a reversal of the novel’s recently acquired status as the master-genre of
Romantic literature, as famously proclaimed by the Romantic poet
Friedrich Schlegel.1 The novel’s conceit is that an eccentric nightwatch-
1
August Klingemann, Nachtwachen von Bonaventura, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Göttingen:
Wallstein, 2012). August Klingemann, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, trans. Gerald
Gillespie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Hereafter cited in the text. Friedrich
Schlegel defined the novel as the distinctively modern genre that epitomized a “progressive,
universal poetry” (progressive Universalpoesie) reuniting all the separate species of poetry.
Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel. Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. Ernst Behler et al.,
35 vols. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöning, 1958–), Vol. 2: “Charakteristiken und Kritiken I
[1796–1801],” 182.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2021
S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel,
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_2
22 S. BOOS

man named Kreuzgang spies on his fellow men and reports back on
their follies in a series of sixteen seemingly disjointed chapters. Through
this nihilist protagonist and proxy, “Bonaventura” challenges the idea
that modern prose literature should serve as a vehicle for exploring con-
sciousness introspectively. Conceived as a crusade against the Romantic
notions of self-analysis and self-expression, the novel can be read as a
literary commentary on a methodological shift in brain research in the
period around 1800.2 Klingemann’s scornful anti-­ idealist critique
rethinks the place of unquestioned scientific orthodoxy in its relation to
both empirical and speculative interpretations of the human mind.
Inaugurating an era where aesthetic responses to the surrounding world
betrayed literature’s growing interest in interacting with reality, The
Nightwatches makes two prominent early neuroscientists objects of ridi-
cule. In an undisguised reference to the Viennese physiologist Franz
Joseph Gall (1758–1828), Kreuzgang mocks a “Doctor Gall in Vienna”
(14) (“Doktor Gall in Wien”) (20). He also makes a conspicuous allu-
sion to Prussian anatomist Samuel Thomas von Soemmering
(1755–1830) and his influential treatise On the Organ of the Soul when
Kreuzgang professes to admire Soemmering’s work “because it never
grudges spending time and effort on so hypothetical an object as the
soul” (120–121) (“weil sie es sich nicht verdrießen läßt an einem so
hypothetischen Gegenstand, als es die Seele ist, Zeit und Mühe zu ver-
schwenden”) (130).
These two scientists’ twin appearance in the novel is no coincidence.
Clearly, the rising prominence of both Soemmering and Gall in and
beyond the world of science at the turn of the century calls the interdisci-
plinarity of early brain research—and ultimately also the inevitability of
neuroscientific progress and its growing influence on the humanities—
into stark relief. This is not to neglect the vital and encompassing role of
satire in The Nightwatches. Kreuzgang parodies everything and everyone,
inserting himself into an impressive range of historical discourses includ-
ing—but not limited to—Kabbalism, alchemy, mysticism, Idealism,
Romanticism, and psychiatry. Despite the long-winded dispute over the
true identity of the novel’s author, now agreed to be the Braunschweig

2
Commentators have established August Klingemann, director of the court theatre in
Braunschweig, as the author of the Nightwatches. Jost Schillemeit, “Bonaventura: der
Verfasser der ‘Nachtwachen’” Studien zur Goethezeit 2006, 309–437. Ruth Haag, “Noch
einmal: Der Verfasser der ‘Nachtwachen von Bonaventura,’” Euphorion 81 (1987): 286–297.
 2 DISSECTING THE SUBJECT: BRAIN LOCALIZATION… 23

theatre director and writer Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann, most

commentators have been in agreement that only a consummate expert on
the founding discourses of Western culture as well as the intellectual cur-
rents of the day could have produced such a learned novel.3 As an unruly
medley of commentary and storytelling, the novel is testimony to the con-
stitutive role of literary knowledge—especially for the Romantics, who
deemed the adoption of concepts drawn from a range of interdisciplinary
discourses an essential criterion for literature’s “universality” (Schlegel).
Previous studies have overlooked the significance of Soemmering’s and
Gall’s neuroanatomic inquiry for The Nightwatches. What makes these two
figures key to understanding the novel are their roles as counterparts to
Kreuzgang’s parody of German idealism. Gall and Soemmering serve as
straw men for Kreuzgang’s mischievous anti-dualist and anti-monist cri-
tique. What may at first appear as gratuitous name-dropping serves satiri-
cal purposes: The novel offers a mocking commentary on the budding
neuroanatomical and psychiatric movements marking the change from
ancient anatomical dissections of the brain to modern neuroscience.
Soemmering and Gall not only figure as characters in the novel, however.
On a more profound level, their pioneering models of the brain come into
relief through the novel’s peculiar structural organization, which enacts
and at the same time critically deconstructs the localizationist view advo-
cated by both Gall and Soemmering. In so doing, the novel proposes
unorthodox new hypotheses with regard to the mind–body divide, as well
as the localization of mental faculties. These hypotheses are presented in
the form of an ironic restaging of Soemmering’s paradoxical and ulti-
mately futile quest for an actual, tangible soul. On the level of narrative
structure and form, the novel reenacts the Gallian brain through its epi-
sodic narrative, which is not only symptomatic of fragmentary perception
and consciousness, but also suggestive of Gall’s radical materialism and its
implicit reduction of free will. Just as Soemmering’s and Kant’s disagree-
ment over a possible seat of the soul is formally embodied in Kreuzgang’s
shifting identities and (as it were) soulless quest, Gall’s craniological ideas
are structurally and metaphorically enacted in the narrative’s proto-­
Gallian, “verticalist” organization.

3
For an overview of the debate, see Gerald Gillespie, “Afterword: Authorship and
Reception,” The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, 127–135.
24 S. BOOS

Beginnings
Modern neuroscience began with the research and theories of Franz
Joseph Gall who for the first time aimed for an analysis of the brain’s func-
tional organization to understand the relationship between mental events
and the organic body.4 Until then, brain research had been restricted to
physiological analyses and morphological characterizations of the nervous
system. The decades near the turn of the century, however, brought a new
methodological framework that was centered on the mind’s embodied
functioning. Working within the disciplinary framework of cerebral anat-
omy, brain researchers in Austria and Prussia inaugurated a debate about
the localizability of mental processes, which lies at the core of neurosci-
ence as a scientific discipline. In the effort to understand the behavioral
principles and organic mechanisms underlying the brain’s functional orga-
nization, Gall shifted his attention to the neuronal structure and reactivity
of brain tissue.5 Challenging the anti-localizationist legacy of Swiss anato-
mist Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), which had dominated the field of
neurology since the eighteenth century, Gall pioneered a system for

4
See Oliver Breidbach, “The Origin and Development of the Neurosciences,” 9.
5
Gall did not publish an authorized version of his findungs until his 1806 Untersuchungen
ueber die Anatomie des Nervensystems ueberhaupt, und des Gehirns insbesondere. Ein dem fran-
zösischen Institut ueberreichtes Mémoire von Gall und Spurzheim; nebst dem Berichte der
H. H. Commissaire des Institutes und den Bemerkungen der Verfasser über diesen Bericht (Paris
und Strasburg: Treuttel und Würtz, 1809). He subsequently published (albeit in limited
circulation) a massive four-volume work in French, entitled Anatomie et physiologie du système
nerveux (Paris: E. Scholl, 1810–1819). The first two volumes of the work were coauthored
by Johann Spurzheim. A subsequent revised version of the same work, which was aimed at a
general public, omitted the name of Spurzheim. F. J. Gall, Sur les fonctions du cerveau et sur
celles de chacune de ses parties (Paris: Ballière, 1822–1825). Translated as Franz Joseph Gall,
On the Functions of the Brain and each of its Parts: with Observations on the Possibility of
Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, or the Moral and Intellectual Dispositions
of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head, 6 vols., trans. Winslow
Lewis (Boston: Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1835). By that time, Spurzheim’s phrenology had
superseded Gall’s craniology in general popularity. For a general introduction to Gall’s work,
and the legacy of craniology in the Anglo-Saxon world in particular, see John van Wyhe,
“The Authority of Human Nature: the Schädellehre of Franz Joseph Gall,” The British
Journal for the History of Science 35.1 (2002): 17–42. See also Stanley Finger, Origins of
Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function (London: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 32–38.
 2 DISSECTING THE SUBJECT: BRAIN LOCALIZATION… 25

classifying the human mind into a series of diversified organs, each of

which had a unique function that correlated with a mental faculty.6
In 1796, the same year in which Gall began lecturing at Vienna
University, Samuel Thomas von Soemmering published his celebrated
treatise On the Organ of the Soul (Über das Organ der Seele, 1796). The
work was a detailed functional interpretation of the brain’s putative mor-
phology that helped establish our present classification of cranial nerves.7
In theory, Soemmering agreed with Gall’s morphological interpretation of
the brain and his admiration of Gall’s work is well-documented: In a diary
entry dating from May 2, 1807, Soemmering approvingly notes his par-
ticipation in a guided visit of a Munich prison during which Gall demon-
strated the correlation between a prisoner’s moral depravity and the shape
of his skull.8 The two scientists shared the goal of looking at the brain in a
new way to prove through physiological analysis that major parts of the
nervous system could be divided functionally, a project that did nothing
less than overcome the Cartesian dualism that had hindered progress in
brain research for one and a half centuries. Yet Soemmering didn’t go as
far as Gall, who viewed the brain as the sole somatic source of a unified
consciousness. In Soemmering’s view, the brain was simply an organic tool
for mediating the relationship between the soul and the body.
The Nightwatches is critically engaged in the formation of a neuroscien-
tific discourse on brain localization, as it was pioneered by Soemmering
and Gall at the turn of the eighteenth century. Klingemann employs liter-
ary experimentation in the service of critiquing these scientists’ attempts
to tackle the brain’s complexity. In the novel, a curious preoccupation

6
See Tadeusz Zawidzki and William Bechtel, “Gall’s Legacy Revisited: Decomposition
and Localization in Cognitive Neuroscience,” The Mind as a Scientific Object: Between Brain
and Culture: Between Brain, ed. Christina E. Erneling et al. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 295–296.
7
Samuel Thomas Soemmering, Über das Organ der Seele (Königsberg: Friedrich
Nicolodius, 1796). Hereafter cited in the text. Translations mine.
8
Soemmering writes: “Zuerst führte man uns in das Kämmerchen zu einem Dieb u[nd]
Mörder—Ein höchst widerliches, trauriges Geschöpf, welches den sogenannten
Diebssinnhügel am Schedel so auffallend ausgezeichnet hat, als wie ihn nachher nur b[e]y
wenigen wahrnahmen.” (“First we were led into a small chamber before a thief and mur-
derer—an extremely revolting, sad creature, upon whose cranium the so-called “thief’s
ridge” was so strikingly displayed, as could be detected in few others.” ) Cited after Gunter
Mann, “Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) und Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring:
Kranioskopie und Gehirnforschung zur Goethezeit,” Samuel Thomas von Soemmering und
die Gelehrten der Goethezeit (Stuttgart und New York: Urban und Fischer, 1985), 181.
26 S. BOOS

with neuroanatomy thus merges with the creative logic of poetics. The
Nightwatches is a unique site of knowledge production that reflects on the
aesthetic and philosophical implications of scientific progress in relation to
the Romantic novel’s idiosyncratic formal features. How, it effectively
wonders, can a novel’s narrative and representational strategies assist the
formation of neuroscientific knowledge? And how, more broadly, should
literature respond to the emerging discipline of modern neuroscience and
its reinvention of subjectivity?

The Organ of the Soul

It would hardly have escaped Klingemann’s notice that Soemmering’s
treatise was conceived as an intervention into the locationalist debate,
which had gained intensity since René Descartes (1596–1650) attempted
to localize the soul in the pineal body. Decartes did not think of the pineal
gland as the part of the body in which the mind is lodged, but as the part
through which mental functions are exercised. In his mechanistic under-
standing of cerebral physiology, low-pressure images of sensory stimuli
appeared on the surface of the pineal gland, a single organ that was sus-
pended in the middle of the brain ventricles. Here the images underwent
a process of transformation. They were received by animal spirits—liquids
flowing through the nerves—and turned into impressions to effect motion.
Descartes believed that it was from the tiny fibers of the substance of the
brain that mental decisions were translated into mechanical actions. Given
his materialistic interpretation of the notion of “idea,” and his mechanistic
explanation of human behavior in general, some historians of science have
considered Descartes the first localizationist.9 Yet the idea of compartmen-
talization is ultimately incompatible with Cartesianism, not the least
because Descartes located the mind as a whole in the body.10 The French
philosopher thereby reinstated the separation between two distinct kinds
of substances, a mechanical body and the immaterial mind. As Descartes

9
Claus Heeschen goes even further, arguing that localizationism “is as old as Plato who
divided the mind into three distinct components and assigned them to three different parts
of the body.” Claus Heeschen, “Franz Joseph Gall,” Reader on the History of Aphasia, ed.
Paul Eling (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1994), 9.
10
Furthermore, as Heeschen points out, the French philosopher “anticipated the possible
counter-argument that such a huge thing as the human mind should not be located in such
a tiny organ as the pineal body and suggested that the mind as a ‘res nonextensa’ is not
dependent on the physical dimensions of its seat.” Heeschen, “Franz Josef Gall,” 8.
 2 DISSECTING THE SUBJECT: BRAIN LOCALIZATION… 27

famously concluded in his Discourse on Method (1637): “This ‘me,’ that is

to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from my body.”11
In the history of brain research, various iterations of Cartesianism effec-
tively blocked the localizationist debate and with it any attempt to natural-
ize human consciousness and subjectivity. Roughly one and a half centuries
after Descartes formulated his cogito, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) rea-
soned that ideas, as the raw matter of knowledge, somehow had to derive
from realities existing independently of the human mind. Yet, as Claus
Heeschen points out, Kant still relied on the Cartesian paradigm when he
contended “that the soul had no bodily instantiation and did not need it
and that it was only the activities of the soul that had to be bound to cer-
tain corporeal loci.”12 It was thus in response to Kant’s transcendental
idealism and a long development of idealistic philosophy that Soemmering
wrote a small treatise, On the Organ of the Soul, in which he proclaimed
that the seat of the soul was to be localized in the brain.13 Based on a com-
bination of a priori reasoning and empirical research, the treatise was
driven by Soemmering’s ambition to make the invisible soul substantial at
last. Soemmering dissected numerous human brains and announced his
discovery of a sensorium commune or “common sensory organ”
(Gemeinschaftliche Empfindungsstelle), a single location where all sense
perceptions and nerve impulses were synesthetically received and bundled
(32).14 According to Soemmering, the sensorium commune “consisted of
the liquid of the brain ventricles (aqua ventriculorum cerebri), or was
located in the liquid of the brain ventricles, or at least would have to be
searched for in the liquid of the brain ventricles; in short: that the liquid of
the brain ventricles had to be its organ” (“dass dies Sensorium commune
in der Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhlen [Aqua Ventriculorum Cerebri]

11
René Descartes, Discourse on the Method: And, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David
Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 22.
12
Heeschen, “Franz Joseph Gall,” 9.
13
On the reemergence of the notion of an “organ of the soul” in German philosophical
and biological debates at the end of the century, and especially in Ernst Platner’s pioneering
work, see Leif Weatherby, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism
between Leibnitz and Marx (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 117.
14
The term sensorium commune derives from Aristotle who in De Anima defines the koinê
aesthesis (sensus communis in Latin) as a higher-order perceptual capacity that cooperates with
both basic sensory perception and human rational thinking. See Pavel Gregoric, Aristotle on
the Common Sense (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See on this also Helmut
Müller-Sievers, The Science of Literature: Essays on an Incalculable Difference (Boston:
DeGruyter, 2015), 75.
28 S. BOOS

bestehe, oder in der Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhlen sich finde, oder wenig-
stens in der Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhlen gesucht werden müsse; kurz:
dass die Flüssigkeit der Hirnhöhlen das Organ desselben sey” (Ibid.).
Convinced that these sensory impulses or “motions” (Bewegungen) could
not simply come to a halt but had to be relayed somewhere, albeit in a
different form, Soemmering concluded that they merged into the liquid
that was located at the end of the nerves and that indeed “touched”
the latter:

When this movement, which results from a sensation induced by a nerve

impulse, overreaches the limit of the brain, than no other solution is possible
than this one:—‘This movement is transferred from the nerve ending at the
outer limit of the brain to the liquid of the brain ventricles, which touches
the former.’ That this transfer of movement, which results from the nerves
and travels from the nerve ending at the outer limit of the brain to the liquid
of the brain ventricles, the movement itself is changed, is the principal proof
of my proposition.

(Wenn diese in einem Empfindung erregenden Nerven erfolgende

Bewegung weiter als seine Hirnendigung sich erstreckt: so ist schlechterd-
ings nichts anders denkbar, als:—‘Diese Bewegung geht aus der Hirnendung
des Nervens in die mit dieser Hirnendigung in Berührung stehende
Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhle unmittelbar über.’ Dass bei diesem Übergehen
der durch die Nerven erfolgenden Bewegungen aus den soliden
Hirnendigungen der Nerven in die Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhlen eine
Änderung der Bewegung vorgeht, ist gerade der wichtigste Beweis für
meinen Satz.) (48)

As the title of his treatise suggests, Soemmering never actually claimed

to have traced the soul itself—the soul was, after all, immaterial—but he
did believe that he had found its organ in form of the liquid that was pres-
ent in the brain ventricles. This organ functioned as a kind of switch point
between the body and the invisible soul. Careful not to blur the boundar-
ies between metaphysics and science, Soemmering stressed that he assumed
a strictly materialist position: he had never set out to localize the soul itself.
He also distanced himself from the question of whether a liquid can be
“animated,” a question that was not physiological but metaphysical
in nature:
 2 DISSECTING THE SUBJECT: BRAIN LOCALIZATION… 29

Before I answer the more subtle questions: ‘Is it possible to accept as a priori
justified that the liquid of the brain ventricles contains the sensorium com-
munis?’ I have to touch on the proposition of the most transcendental phys-
iology, which leads far into the remote fields of metaphysics, namely: “Can
liquid be animated?” For here too it is the case that—as Kant says—in the
antagonism of reason that ventures beyond the limits of possible experi-
ences, the task is not actually physiological, but transcendental.

(Bevor ich zu den subtilen Fragen komme: ‘Lässt’s sich etwa auch a priori
einsehen, dass die Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhlen das Gemeinschaftliche
Sensorium enthält?’ muß ich vorher den Satz der transcendentalsten, bis in
die fernsten Gefilde der Metaphysik führenden, Physiologie –nämlich:
‘Kann eine Feuchtigkeit animiert seyn?’ ein wenig berühren. Es geschieht
nämlich auch hier, das—wie Kant sagt—überhaupt in dem Widerstreite
einer sich über die Gränzen möglicher Erfahrung hinauswagenden Vernunft
angetroffen wird, dass die Aufgabe eigentlich nicht physiologisch sondern
transcendental ist.) (37)

Given his trepidations about crossing disciplinary boundaries, it is odd

that Soemmering sought out Kant to write a critical introduction to his
treatise. Kant readily responded to Soemmering’s request for a philosophi-
cal commentary and the latter included Kant’s letter as an appendix to his
publication. Sommering must have been blinded by excitement. How else
could he fail to realize that Kant’s response provided anything but the
philosophical support he had hoped for?15 Instead of giving his metaphysi-
cal and physiological speculations legitimacy, Kant openly refuted the very
basis of Soemmering’s methodology: “The required solution of the task
regarding the seat of the soul, with which metaphysics is supposed to
come up, leads to an impossible magnitude (√-2) and one can say to the
person who undertakes to provide it, with the words of Terence: nihilo plus
agas, quam si des operam, ut cum ratione in sanias.” (“If you try to impose
certainty on uncertainty by reason, you’d achieve no more than if you set
about going insane by reason.”16) Insisting that the soul could not in prin-
ciple be described physiologically, Kant’s condemnation of Soemmering’s

15
See Breidbach, “The Origin and Development of the Neurosciences,” 10. Also Paolo
Pecere, “Kant’s Über das Organ der Seele and the Limits of Physiology: Arguments and
Legacy,” Kant’s Shorter Writings: Critical Paths Outside the Critiques, ed. Robert Hanna
et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 214–230.
16
Terence, The Eunuch, II. 61–63. Terence, ed. and trans. John Barsby, 2 vols. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 1: 321.
30 S. BOOS

project is unequivocal. Soemmering’s treatise nevertheless appeared with

a dedication to Kant and despite the rebuff, it resonated powerfully with
his lay and medical audience, and his philosophical and scientific readers.
For the latter, On the Organ of the Soul opened new routes of research that
would influence eminent neuroscientists like Paul Broca (1824–1880) and
Carl Wernicke (1848–1905) and eventually culminate in a series of
groundbreaking neuroanatomical theories linking cognitive functions to
specific regions in the brain’s cerebral cortex.
But Soemmering’s publication also left its mark in the domain of litera-
ture, as it ostensibly inspired Kreuzgang’s quest for even as much as a trace
of a soul-like substance. The novel is itself an epistemological project, if an
ironic one, as it generates a clever commentary on the pitfalls of asking the
kinds of elusive questions that drive Soemmering’s, and by extension
Kreuzgang’s, inquisitive minds. By repeating in endless variations his con-
viction that life is futile and lacking in meaning, Kreuzgang’s reflections
pose an epistemological challenge that goes to the heart of Terence’s
assertion (as referenced by Kant) that reason cannot control a situation
that is devoid of reason. This sort of probing nihilism culminates in
Kreuzgang’s insight that there are no grounds for believing anything at all.
The Nightwatches’ basic premise of epistemological uncertainty is
underpinned by the gradual disintegration of its cast of characters into a
confounding set of elusive identities. The protagonist in particular
descends into an introspective spiral of illusion and delusion as it arises in
the wake of Kant. Kreuzgang’s world is truly a fiction. This shows the
significance of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s transcendental idealism as a satiri-
cal foil for the novel.17 When Kreuzgang references “[Fichte’s] logical/
rigorous system” (72) (“[ein] konsequentes System wie Fichte”) (83), he
is alluding to the Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre, 1794/95),
which represents the idealist philosopher’s elaborate effort to ground his
anti-dualistic philosophical system upon the concept of subjectivity.18 In
his strangeness and indefinability, Kreuzgang embodies the Fichtean first

17
See on this Detlef Kremer, “Identität und Selbstauflösung: Klinger und die ‘Nachtwachen’
von Bonaventura,” Der deutsche Roman der Spätaufklärung: Fiktion und Wirklichkeit, ed.
Harro Zimmermann (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990), 289.
18
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Wissenschaftslehre 11. Vortrag im Jahre 1804, J. G. Fichte
Gesamtausgabe der Bayrischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth and H. Gliwitzky
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt: Friedrich Frommann, 1985). Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of
Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Appleton-
Century Crofts, 1970).
 2 DISSECTING THE SUBJECT: BRAIN LOCALIZATION… 31

principle of self-positing (“the I posits itself as self-positing”)—he personi-

fies “the pure I” (“das reine Ich”) or even consciousness itself. But the
novel also offers a haunting critique of Fichte’s system. Kreuzgang knows
that Fichte is caught up in an ineluctable circularity and thus he paints the
prospect of a universe marked by tedium and nothingness, which naturally
results from the idealist philosopher’s concept of self-positing freedom: “I
had now ceased thinking everything else and was thinking only myself! No
object was to be found round about but the great dreadful I, which feasted
on itself and in devouring constantly regenerated itself. I was not sinking,
for there was no longer space; just as little did I float upward.” (107) (“Ich
hatte jetzt aufgehört alles andere zu denken, und dachte nur an mich
selbst! Kein Gegenstand war ringsum anzufinden, als das große schreckli-
che Ich, das an sich selbst zehrte, und im Verschlingen stets sich wiederge-
bar. Ich sank nicht denn es war kein Raum mehr, eben so wenig schien ich
emporzuschweben.”) (116) Kreuzgang is an emblem of idealism’s failure
to assume or solidify a definitive concept of identity: “I’ve already often
made a start, sitting before the mirror of my imagination, at portraying
myself; I have always, however, bashed in the damned countenance when
I finally found that it resembled a puzzle painting that, regarded from
three different standpoints, presents one of the Graces, a monkey, and en
face the devil.” (49) (“Ich bin schon oft daran gegangen vor dem Spiegel
meiner Einbildungskraft sitzend, mich selbst leidlich zu portraitiren, habe
aber immer in das verdammte Antlitz hineingeschlagen, wenn ich zuletzt
fand, daß es einem Vexiergemälde glich, das von drei verschiedenen
Standpunkten betrachtet, eine Grazie, eine Meerkatze und en face den
Teufel dazu darstellt.”) (56)
Kreuzgang here echoes the idealist paradigm of knowledge according
to which we know only what we create or what we produce according to
the laws of our mental activity. As Kreuzgang justifies his solipsistic mean-
derings, “so very much does all reside in ourselves and there is nothing
real outside of us” (103) (“so sehr liegt alles in uns selbst und ist ausser
uns nichts Reelles”) (112). This is consistent with the conceit of
Klingemann’s novel. The entire work appears to be the product of
Kreuzgang’s mind, a relentless fantasy that springs forth from his imagina-
tion in a tireless act of will.19 Channeling the basic tenets of Fichte’s theory

Jeffrey Sammons aptly identifies an “artistic meaning in the external form of the
19

Nachtwachen” and its seemingly “chaotic, uncontrolled potpourri” structure. Jeffrey

Sammons, Die Nachtwachen von Bonaventura. A Structural Interpretation (De Hague:
Mouton, 1965), 32.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
the other hand, he did not know of the fish, he must have expected a
watery grave, whether the idolaters threw him into the sea, or
whether he waited until the ship went to pieces. In this case, also, if
a Talmudist, it would have been his duly to have staged where he
was, and if he perished, die in the fulfilment or the command, to
show no mercy to idolaters. But he did not—he had compassion on
them, and, to save their lives, relinquished his only chance of safety,
by telling them to throw him into the sea. It is plain, therefore, Jonah
was not a Talmudist. We have here, then, three inspired prophets,
Daniel, Elisha, and Jonah, all bearing a practical testimony against
the Talmudic principle, which extends God’s law against the
Canaanites to all idolaters, and under all circumstances.
Lastly, We have the testimony of the God of Israel himself. He who
gave the command to destroy the Canaanites on account of their
exceeding wickedness, shows by his own dealings with the world,
that this case is an exception to the general rule, for “The Lord is
good to all, and his mercies are over all his works.” He provides food
and clothing for the idolater, as well as for those who worship him in
truth; or, as the New Testament says, “He maketh his sun to rise on
the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the
unjust.” (Matt. vi. 45.) He, then, whose conduct most resembles that
of his Creator, is, beyond all doubt, the nearest to the truth. The
Talmud, therefore, is wrong, and the New Testament explanation of
the command, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” is right. We
ask the Jews, then, to account for this fact, that Jesus of Nazareth
was right, and those who condemned him wrong, respecting one-half
of the whole law. And we ask, moreover, those Jews who abhor the
above Talmudic principles, how they can conscientiously join in the
synagogue prayers, which ascribe to the Talmud Divine authority?
We ask them why, at the very least, they have never publicly
protested against these enormities; but allow their brethren through
the world to remain victims to a system, which not only contradicts
the written law of God, but outrages all the better feelings of even
fallen humanity?
 No. VI.
COMPULSORY CONVERSION OF THE GENTILES.

When, at the close of the fifteenth century, the Jews were driven out
of Spain, some of the magnanimous exiles, who had preferred loss
of all things to a compulsory change of religion, arrived at the
frontiers of Portugal, and there sought an asylum. A permanent
abode was refused, and a temporary sojourn was granted them on
two conditions—1st, That each should pay a certain quantity of gold
for his admission; and 2dly, That if they were found in Portugal after
a certain day, they should either consent to be baptized, or be sold
for slaves.[12] Now Jews of every degree and shade of religious belief
will agree with us, that these conditions were most disgraceful to
those who imposed them. To refuse gratuitous assistance to the poor
and needy, merely because they had been brought up in a different
religious faith, was utterly unworthy of those professing faith in
Divine revelation. To compel the unfortunate to choose between loss
of liberty or of conscience was the act of a fiend. But now suppose
that the Portuguese had endeavoured to persuade these poor exiles
that their conduct, however base it might appear, was commanded
by God himself. Suppose, further, that when called upon to prove
that this command was from God, they had confessed that no such
command was to be found in the written books of their religion, that it
was only a tradition of their oral law, do you think that the Jewish
exiles would have been satisfied with such proof, and submitted?
Would they not, in the first place, have questioned the authority of a
command resting merely upon uncertain tradition? And would they
not have argued, from the detestable nature of the command itself,
that it could not possibly emanate from the God of truth and love?
We ask you then to apply these principles to ‫ תורה שבעל פה‬the oral
law. The Portuguese refused to perform an act of humanity to the
unfortunate Jewish exiles, unless they were paid for it. Your oral law,
as we showed in our last number, forbids you to give medical advice
to a sick idolater gratuitously. The Portuguese voluntarily undertook
to convert the Jews by force. Your oral law teaches compulsory
conversion as a Divine command. If the oral law could be enforced,
liberty of conscience would be at an end. Neither Jew nor Gentile
would be permitted to exercise the judgment, which God has given
him. His only alternative would be submission to Rabbinic authority,
or death. The dreadful command to kill, by any means, those
Israelites who have become epicureans, or idolaters, or apostates, is
well known,[13] and sufficiently proves that the oral law recognises no
such thing as liberty of conscience in Israel. It pronounces a man an
apostate if he denies its Divine authority, and demands his life as the
penalty. The execution of this one command would fill the world with
blood and horror; and recall all the worst features of inquisitorial
tyranny. Not now to mention those Israelites who have embraced
Christianity, there are in England, and every part of Europe, many
high-minded and honourable Jews, who have practically renounced
the authority of the oral law. The Rabbinical millennium would
commence by handing over all such to the executioner. Their talents,
their virtue, their learning, their moral excellence, would avail
nothing. Found guilty of epicureanism or apostasy, because they
dared to think for themselves, and to act according to their
convictions, they would have to undergo the epicurean’s or the
apostate’s fate.
Such is the toleration of the oral law towards native Israelites, but it
is equally severe to converts. It allows no second thoughts. It
legislates for relapsed converts, as the Spanish Inquisition did for
those Jews who, after embracing Christianity, returned to their
former faith and sentences all such to death.
‫ ואחר כך וצה לחזור מאחרי ה׳ ולהיות גר תושב בלבד‬, ‫בן נח שנתגייר ומל וטבל‬
‫ אלא יהיה כישראל לכל דבר או יהרג ׃‬, ‫ אין שומעין לו‬, ‫כשהיה מקודם‬
“A Noahite who has become a proselyte, and been circumcised and
baptized, and afterwards wishes to return from after the Lord, and to
be only a sojourning proselyte, as he was before, is not to be
listened to—on the contrary, either let him be an Israelite in
everything, or let him be put to death.” (Hilchoth Melachim, c. x. 3.)
In this law there is an extraordinary severity. The oral law admits that
a Noahite, that is, a heathen who has taken upon himself the seven
commandments of the children of Noah, may be saved. It cannot,
therefore, be said that the severity was dictated by a wish to deter
men from error, and to restrain them from rushing upon everlasting
ruin, as the Inquisition pleads. The oral law goes a little further, and
not only will not permit a man to change his creed, but will not even
suffer him to change his ceremonial observances. Though the man
should commit no crime, and though he should continue to worship
the one true God, in spirit and in truth, yet if he only alter the outward
forms of his religion, modern Judaism requires that he should be put
to death.
But the tender care of the oral law is not limited to the narrow
confines of Judaism, it extends also to the heathen, amongst whom
it directs the true faith to be propagated by the sword. First, it gives a
particular rule. In case of war with the Gentiles, it commands the
Jews to offer peace on two conditions—the one that they should
become tributaries, the other that they should renounce idolatry and
take upon them the seven precepts of the Noahites, and then adds—
‫ואם לא השלימו או שהשלימו ולא קבלו שבע מצוות עושין עמהם מלחמה והורגין‬
‫ ובוזזין כל ממונם וטפם ואין הורגין אשה ולא קטן שנאמר‬, ‫כל הזכים הגדולים‬
‫והנשים והטף וכו׳ ׃‬
“But if they will not make peace, or if they will make peace but will
not take upon them the seven commandments, the war is to be
carried on against them, and all the adult males are to be put to
death; and their property and their little ones are to be taken as
plunder. But no woman or male infant is to be put to death, for it is
said, ‘The women and the little ones’ (Deut. xx. 14.), and here little
ones mean male infants.” (Hilchoth Melachim, c. vi. 4.) Now what
difference, we would ask, is there between the conduct here
prescribed, and that actually practised by the Portuguese, at the
period above referred to, and thus described by a Jew:[14]—“At the
expiration of the appointed time, most of the Jews had emigrated,
but many still remained in the country. The King therefore gave
orders to take away from them all their children under fourteen years
of age, to distribute them amongst Christians, to send them to the
newly-discovered islands, and thus to pluck up Judaism by the roots.
Dreadful was the cry of lamentation uttered by the parents, but the
unfortunates found no mercy.” Do you condemn this conduct in the
Portuguese? Be then consistent, and condemn it in the Talmud too.
As for ourselves, we abhor it as much, yea more, in those calling
themselves Christians, We look upon the actors in that transaction
as a disgrace to the Christian name, and the deed itself as a foul blot
upon the history of Christendom. But we cannot help thinking that,
dreadful and detestable as this mode of conversion is, it pleased
God in his providence to suffer wicked men thus to persecute Israel,
that the Jews might have a practical experience of the wickedness of
the oral law, and thus be led to reject such persecuting principles.
The Jewish nation rejected the Lord Jesus Christ, and preferred the
oral law. This law, not dictated by a spirit of retaliation upon the
Portuguese, but invented by the Pharisees centuries before Portugal
was a kingdom, commanded the Jews to convert the heathen by
force, to murder all who would not consent to be thus converted, and
to take away the children. And God suffered them to fall into the
hands of men of similar principles, who took away their children,
attempted to convert themselves by force, and sold for slaves the
Jews who refused to be thus converted; so that the very misfortunes
of the nation testify aloud against those traditions which they
preferred to the Word of God. But perhaps some Jew will say that
this is only a particular command, referring to the nations in the
vicinity of the land of Israel. We reply, that the command to convert
the heathen by force, is not particular, but general, referring to the
whole world. If the Jews had the power, this is the conduct which
they are to pursue towards all the nations of the earth.
‫וכן צוה משה רבינו מפי הגבורה לכוף את כל באי העולם לקבל מצוות שנצטוו בני‬
‫ וכל מי שלא קבל יהרג ׃‬, ‫נח‬
“And thus Moses our master, has commanded us, by Divine
tradition, to compel all that come into the world to take upon
themselves the commandments imposed upon the sons of Noah,
and whosoever will not receive them is to be put to death.” (Hilchoth
Melachim, c. viii. 4.)
Such is the Talmudic system of toleration, and such the means which
it prescribes for the conversion of the world. We acknowledge that
persons calling themselves Christians have had an oral law very
similar in its principles and precepts, but we fearlessly challenge the
whole world to point out anything similar in the doctrines of Jesus
Christ, or in the writings of his apostles. The New Testament does,
indeed, teach us to seek the conversion of the world, not by force of
arms, but by teaching the truth. “Go ye, therefore, and make
disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and
of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all
things whatsoever I have commanded you.” (Matt. xxviii. 19.) In the
parable of the tares and wheat, Jesus of Nazareth hath expressly
taught us that physical force is not to be employed in order to
remove moral error. The servants are represented as asking the
master of the house, whether they should go and root out the tares
that grew amongst the wheat, but the answer is, “Nay, lest while ye
gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both
grow together until the harvest; and in the time of harvest I will say to
the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in
bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.” (Matt. xiii.
24-43.) He tells us expressly to have nothing to do with the sword,
“For all they that take the sword, shall perish with the sword.” (Matt.
xxvi. 52.) And therefore the apostle says, “The weapons of our
warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of
strong holds.” (2 Cor. x. 4.) Here again, then, there is a great
difference between the oral law and the New Testament. The former
commands that the truth be maintained and propagated by the
sword. The latter tells us that “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing
by the Word of God.” Which, then, is most agreeable to the doctrine
of Moses and the prophets? We answer fearlessly, the means
prescribed by the New Testament, for—
1st, No instance can be adduced from the Old Testament, in which
God commanded the propagation of the truth by the power of the
sword. The extirpation of the seven nations of Canaan is not in point,
for the Israelites were not commanded to make them any offer of
mercy on condition of conversion. The measure of their iniquity was
full, and therefore the command to destroy every soul absolute.
Neither in the command referred to by Maimonides is there the least
reference to conversion. It simply says, “When thou comest nigh
unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shall
be if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall
be that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto
thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make no peace with
thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: and
when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt
smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword. But the women
and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all
the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself.” (Deut. xx. 10-14.)
Here is not one word said about conversion, or about the seven
commandments of the sons of Noah. The command itself is
hypothetical, “When thou comest nigh unto a city;” and therefore
gives no colour nor pretext for setting out on a war of conversion, “to
compel all that come into the world.” As it stands, it is a humane and
merciful direction to restrain the horrors of the then prevailing system
of warfare; and beautifully exemplifies the value which God sets
upon the life of man, whatever his nation or his religion. He will not
suffer it to be destroyed unnecessarily; and even in case of
extremity, he commands the lives of the women and the children,
who never bore arms against Israel, to be spared. There is not a
syllable about forcing their consciences: that is all pure gratuitous
addition of the oral law, which turns a merciful command into an
occasion of bigotry and religious tyranny.
2dly, As God has given no command to propagate religion by the
sword, so neither has He given any countenance to such doctrine,
by the instrumentality which He has employed for the preservation of
religion in the world. He did not choose a mighty nation of soldiers as
the depositories of his truth, nor any of the overturners of kingdoms
for his prophets. If it had been his intention to convert the world by
force of arms, Nimrod would have been a more suitable instrument
than Abraham, and the mighty kingdom of Egypt more fitted for the
task than the family of Hebrew captives. But by the very choice He
showed, that truth was to be propagated by Divine power working
conviction in the minds of men, and not by physical strength. It would
have been just as easy for him to have turned every Hebrew captive
in Egypt into a Samson, as to turn the waters into blood; and to have
sent them into the world to overturn idolatry by brute force; but He
preferred to enlighten the minds of men by exhibiting a series of
miracles, calculated to convince them of his eternal power and
Godhead. When the ten tribes revolted, and fell away into idolatry,
He did not employ the sword of Judah, but the voice of his prophets,
to recall them to the truth. He did not compel them, as the oral law
would have done, to an outward profession, but dealt with them as
with rational beings, and left them to the choice of their hearts.
Nineveh was not converted by Jewish soldiers, but by the preaching
of Jonah. So far is God from commanding the propagation of religion
by the sword, that He would not even suffer a man of war to build a
temple for his worship. When David thought of erecting a temple, the
Lord said unto him, “Thou hast shed blood abundantly, and hast
made great wars; thou shalt not build an house unto my name,
because thou hast shed much blood upon the earth.” (1 Chron. xxii.
8.) Thus hath God shown his abhorrence of compulsory conversion,
and in all his dealings confirmed his Word, “Not by might nor by
power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” (Zech. iv. 6.)
3dly, God has in his Word promised the conversion of the world, but
not by the means prescribed in the oral law. His promise to Abraham
was, “In thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” (Gen.
xxii. 18.) Now this can hardly mean that his descendants are to treat
all nations, as the Portuguese treated the Jews. The 72nd Psalm
gives rather a different view of the fulfilment of this promise. It
promises not a victorious soldier like Mahomet, but one “in whose
days the righteous shall flourish, and abundance of peace so long as
the moon endureth.... All nations shall call Him blessed.” The
prophet Isaiah tells us “that out of Zion shall go forth (not conquering
armies to compel, but) the law, and the Word of the Lord from
Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and rebuke many
people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their
spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Zechariah says, “He
shall speak peace to the heathen;” and declares that the conversion
of the world will not be the reward of conquest, but the result of
conviction. “In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall
take hold, out of all the languages of the nations, even shall take
hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you, for
we have heard that God is with you.” (Zech. viii. 23.) Here again,
then, you see that whilst the oral law differs from Moses and the
prophets, the New Testament agrees with them. Account, then, for
this extraordinary fact, that whilst the whole Jewish nation lost the
great and glorious doctrine of liberty of conscience, it has been
preserved for you and for all mankind by Jesus of Nazareth. Just
suppose that the principles of the Talmud had triumphed, either
amongst the Jews or the Portuguese, what would have been the
consequence to the world? If the Talmudists had attained to supreme
power, we should have had to choose between compulsory
conversion and the sword. If the Portuguese had attained to
universal dominion, both you and we should have had the alternative
of compulsory conversion or the fires of the Inquisition. In either
case, the noblest and most precious gift that the God of heaven ever
sent down to earth, liberty of conscience, would have been extinct.
But, thank God, the doctrine of Jesus of Nazareth has triumphed
over the oral laws of both Jews and Portuguese, and the result is,
that both you and we have the liberty of worshipping God according
to the convictions of our understanding and the dictates of our
conscience. Behold, then, how you are indebted to Jesus of
Nazareth. Without him you would not have known religious liberty,
either theoretically or practically. He is right on this all-important
point, whilst those who condemned him to death and rejected his
claims are wrong. If he was not the true Messiah, but only a
pretender, how is it that God has made him and his doctrine the
exclusive channel for preserving the truth of his Word, and
conveying such blessings to you as well as to us Gentiles? If the
Pharisees were right in rejecting him, how is it that God has
rewarded their piety by giving them over to such gross delusions,
and making them the transmitters of doctrines, which would fill the
world with blood and hatred and discord, and make even the truth
odious in the eyes of all mankind? For ourselves we cannot help
coming to the conclusion, that He who has taught us mercy and love
to all men, and delivered both you and us from such horrors—and
who, in doing this, rose above all the doctrines of his nation and his
times, was taught of God, and is, therefore, the true Messiah, the
Saviour of the world.
Certain it is, that this doctrine has already been a blessing to the
world; and that until your nation embrace its principles, at least on
this one point of love and toleration, it is impossible that the
promised glory and pre-eminence of the Jewish nation should come.
With such principles as are inculcated in the oral law, a restoration to
the land of your forefathers would be no blessing. It would only
realize all the legislative and religious speculations of the Talmudists,
and arm them with the power to tyrannize over their more
enlightened brethren. It would be the triumph of tradition over the
Word of God, and that the God of truth will not permit. It would be to
instal the spirit of intolerance and persecution on the throne of love
and charity, and that God will not suffer. The Talmud is, thus, a main
obstacle in the way of God’s fulfilling his promises to the nation,
because it incapacitates Israel for the reception or the right
employment of the promised blessings. Is it not, then, the duty of all
Jews who desire and long for the glory and the happiness which God
has promised, to lift up their voice with power, and to protest against
that system which prevents the fulfilment of God’s promises; and by
all lawful means to endeavour to deliver their brethren from the
bondage of such intolerance?
 No. VII.
THE FEAST OF PURIM.

The feast of Purim now at hand, recalls to the Jewish recollection

one of those miraculous deliverances, with which the history of Israel
abounds. The narrative of the institution, as contained in the Bible, is
a signal proof and illustration of the superintending providence of
God, instructive to all the world, but calling peculiarly for the gratitude
and praise of the Jewish nation, whose forefathers were then
delivered. And it is much to the honour of their posterity that they
have not suffered the lapse of more than twenty centuries to wear
out the memory of this great event, but that to this day they observe
its anniversary with alacrity and zeal. If the oral law simply contented
itself with commanding the observance and prescribing the mode of
worship for such an important season, we should have no fault to
find; but the oral law claims for itself Divine origin and authority,
anathematizes any denial of these claims as heresy, and sentences
the heretic to death. We are, therefore, compelled to examine its
pretensions, and to scrutinize its features, in order to see whether
they really bear the stamp of divinity. We have already pointed out
some, that savoured more of earth than heaven: the constitutions for
the feast of Purim may be traced to the same source. The following
law respecting the meal to be provided on this occasion did certainly
not come to man from heaven:—
‫ ושותה יין עד‬, ‫חובת סעודה זו שיאכל בשר ויתקן סעודה נאה כפי אשר תמצא ידו‬
‫שישתכר וירדם בשכרותו ׃‬
“A man’s duty with regard to the feast is, that he should eat meat and
prepare a suitable feast according to his means; and drink wine, until
he be drunk, and fell asleep in his drunkenness.” (Hilchoth Megillah,
c. ii. 15.) The Talmud, however, is not satisfied with so indefinite a
direction, but lays down, with its usual precision, the exact measure
of intoxication required.
‫חייב איניש לבסומי בפוריא עד דלא ידע בין ארור המן לברוך מרדכי ׃‬
“A man is bound to get so drunk with wine at Purim, as not to know
the difference between Cursed is Haman, and Blessed is Mordecai.”
(Megillah, fol. 7, col. 2.) But perhaps some learned champion of the
Talmud will fly to that sort of refuge for destitute commentators, the
parabolic language of the orient, and tell us that this precept is not to
be understood literally but figuratively; and that so far from
recommending intoxication, it means to inculcate excess of sobriety
or devotion, such abstraction of the senses, from all outward objects,
as not to distinguish between cursed is Haman and blessed is
Mordecai. This sort of defence is neither imaginary nor novel. In this
way Rabbi Eliezer’s permission to split open an unlearned man like a
fish has been made to signify the spiritual opening of the
understanding, and of course the overweening anxiety of the
Rabbies to communicate instruction to the ignorant. But however we
dull Gentiles may be enlightened by such an exposition, we much
doubt whether the greatest amhaaretz in Israel will believe the
interpretation. The great and learned Rabbies Solomon Jarchi and
Moses Maimonides have understood literal drunkenness, and have
named wine as the legitimate liquor. R. Joseph Karo has simply
given the command verbatim as it stands in the Talmud, but a note in
the Orach Chaiim shows, that some of the modern Rabbies were not
able to swallow such a command, and, therefore, say that an
Israelite does his duty, if he only drink a little more than usual. The
Talmud itself admits of no such softening down, nor explaining away,
for immediately after the precept it goes on to propose an example
and to furnish an illustration of its meaning in the following history of
the very Rabbi, on whose authority this traditional command rests;—
‫ איבסום קם רבה שחטיה לרבי‬, ‫רבה ורבי זירא עבדו סעודת פורים בהדי הדדי‬
‫ לשנה אמר ליה ניתי מר ונעביד סעודת פורים‬, ‫זירא למחר בעא רחמי ואחייה‬
‫בהדי הדדי אמר ליה לאו בכל שעתא ושעתא מתרחיש ניסא ׃‬
“Rabba and Rabbi Zira made their Purim entertainment together.
When Rabba got drunk, he arose and killed Rabbi Zira. On the
following day he prayed for mercy, and restored him to life. The
following year Rabba proposed to him again to make their Purim
entertainment together, but he answered, ‘Miracles don’t happen
every day.’” (Talmud, Tr. Megillah, fol. 7, col. 2.) This history of one of
the men who are authorities for the above Talmudic command to get
drunk, plainly illustrates its meaning, and shows that the Talmud
meant and commanded its followers to drink wine to excess on this
occasion. It sets before them the example of one of the greatest
Rabbies committing murder in his drunkenness, and so far from
reprobating this sin, it gravely tells us that God interposed by a
miracle to prevent the ill-consequences; and that the Rabbi, far from
being cured of his propensity, or making any declaration of his
intention to amend, continued in that state of mind, that his colleague
found it imprudent to trust himself at his table. Now every body that
is acquainted with the Jews, knows that they are a temperate and
sober people; and because they are so, we ask them whether the
above command can be from God? and whether they believe that
the Talmud speaks truth in giving the above narrative? It says not
merely that men may get drunk with impunity, but that to get drunk is
an act of piety, and obedience to a command! Here, again, the
Talmud is directly at issue with the New Testament, which says, “Be
not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.” (Ephes. v. 18.) “Take heed
to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with
surfeiting, and drunkenness, and the cares of this life, and so that
day come upon you unawares.” (Luke xxi. 34.) The New Testament
holds out to us no hope, that if in our drunkenness, we should
commit murder, a miracle will be wrought in order to deliver us from
the consequences; but tells us, that “neither murderers nor
drunkards shall inherit the kingdom of God.” (1 Cor. vi. 9, 10.) Now
which of these two doctrines is the most agreeable to the revealed
will of God? How would you desire to meet death, if death should
come upon the feast of Purim? Would you wish the angel of death to
find you, in obedience to the oral law, insensible from overmuch
wine? or in that state of sobriety and thoughtfulness prescribed by
Jesus of Nazareth? Does not the inward tribunal of the heart decide
that Jesus of Nazareth is right, and that the Talmud is wrong? And
does not the Old Testament confirm the sentence? Isaiah says,
“Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may
follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them!
and the harp and the viol, the tabret and pipe, and wine are in their
feasts; but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the
operation of his hands. Therefore my people are gone into captivity,
because they have no knowledge; and their honourable men are
famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst.” (Isaiah v. 11-13.)
And so Moses commands the parents that should they have a son “a
glutton and a drunkard,” to bring him to justice, and to have him
stoned. (Deut. xxi. 20.) The Talmud, then, manifestly contradicts the
Old Testament; it therefore cannot speak truth when it narrates that
God wrought a miracle in order to save a drunkard and a murderer
from that punishment, which He had himself commanded to be
visited upon either of these crimes. The story of the miracle is
therefore a palpable falsehood, contradictory to the law of Moses,
and derogatory to the honour of God. How, then, can the Talmud be
of God? If you attempt to distinguish, as some do, between the
Talmud and the oral law, and say that though the Talmud contains
the oral law, yet it is not all inspired, then we ask, how can you rely
upon the testimony of a witness convicted of wilful, gross, and
flagrant falsehood? If you do not believe in the above miracle of the
drunken Rabba, you denounce it as a liar. If it lie, then, upon this
solemn occasion in relating a miracle, in handing down the law of
God, how can you depend upon it at all? If it does not scruple to
forge miracles, what warrant have you for believing that it does not
forge laws also?
But suppose, which is far more probable, that Rabbi Zira, when killed
by Rabba, had not come to life again, would Rabba, in the eye of the
modern Jewish law, be considered as a murderer, and guilty of
death, or as an innocent person, who might safely be permitted to go
at large, and pursue his usual avocations? This is a question well
deserving an answer from some of your learned men, and naturally
suggested by some principles asserted and implied in the following
decisions of the oral law:—
‫ והדברים ידועים שהיא תקנת‬, ‫קריאת המגלה בזנה מצות עשה מדברי סופרים‬
, ‫ אנשים ונשים וגרים ועבדים משוחררים‬, ‫ והכל חייבים בקריאתה‬, ‫הנביאים‬
‫ ואפילו כהנים בעבודמן מבטלין עבודתן ובאין‬, ‫ומחנכין את הקטנים לקריאתה‬
‫ קל וחומר‬, ‫ וכן מבטלין תלמוד תורה לשמוע מקרא מגלה‬, ‫לשמוע מקרא מגלה‬
‫ ואין לך דבר שנדחה‬, ‫לשאר מצוות של תורה שכולן נדחין מפני מקרא מגלה‬
‫מקרא מגלה מפניו חוץ ממה מצוה שאין לו קוברים שהפוגע בו קוברו תחלה ואחר‬
‫כך קורא ׃‬
“The reading of the Megillah (the book of Esther) in its time is an
affirmative precept according to the words of the scribes, and it is
known that this is an ordinance of the Prophets. The obligation to
read it rests upon all, men, women, and proselytes, and manumitted
slaves. Children also are to be accustomed to the reading of it. Even
priests in their service are to neglect their service, and to come to
hear the reading of the Megillah. In like manner the study of the law
is to be omitted, in order to hear the reading of the Megillah, and a
fortiori all the remaining commandments of the law, all of which give
way to the reading of the Megillah: but there is nothing to which the
reading of the Megillah gives way, except that particular class of
dead person called the dead of the commandment, who has none to
bury him. He that happens upon him is first to bury him, and
afterwards to read.” (Hilchoth Megillah, c. i. 1.) On this extract we
have several remarks to make, but at present we request the
attention of our readers to the reason given why the reading of the
Megillah is more important than any of the commandments. It is this.
According to the oral law, “the study of the law is equivalent to all the
commandments, and the other commandments are to give way to
this study.” But according to the passage before us, the study of the
law is to give way to the reading of the Megillah. The reading of the
Megillah, therefore, being greater than the greatest of the
commandments, is of course greater than all the inferior ones. Now
apply this reasoning to the above command to get drunk, and you
will prove that getting drunk at Purim feast is the greatest of all the
commandments. In order to get drunk, it is plain that the study of the
law must give way. The man who cannot distinguish between
“Cursed be Haman and blessed be Mordecai,” certainly cannot
study, neither can he bury the dead. The commandment, therefore,
to which the study of the law and the burying of the dead give way,
must be the greatest of all the commandments; i.e., the getting drunk
on Purim is the greatest of all the commandments. This conclusion,
which inevitably follows upon Talmudic principles, necessarily shows
that those principles are false. But that is not the object for which I
have exhibited this conclusion; it is with reference to the case of
Rabba above-mentioned. Having got drunk according as the oral law
commanded, and having thereby obeyed the greatest of the
commandments, and one to which all others are necessarily in
abeyance, was he guilty or innocent in having murdered R. Zira? It
certainly seems a very hard case to condemn him to death for an
act, which resulted from his obedience to the greatest of all the
commandments. He might urge that he had a great dislike to
drunkenness—that he had overcome his natural aversion simply to
satisfy the Rabbinical requirements—that by the time that he had
arrived at the prescribed incompetency to distinguish between
Haman and Mordecai, he had lost all power of distinguishing
between right and wrong—that, therefore, he had not done it with
malice propense; what sentence, therefore, does the Talmud
pronounce against a murderer of this sort? If Rabba was allowed to
go at large, as would appear from his invitation to Rabbi Zira the
following year, a repetition of the same offence was possible, a
repetition of the miracle in R. Zira’s opinion highly improbable. Thus
Rabba might go on from year to year killing one or more with
impunity, and would be a far more dangerous neighbour than “the ox
that was wont to push with his horn.” If, on the other hand, he is to
be punished capitally, then the oral law is plainly not from God; for
obedience to the greatest of its commandments makes it possible for
a man to commit the greatest of crimes, and to subject himself to the
extremity of punishment. But we object, secondly, to the exaltation of
a mere human ordinance above the Word of God. The reading of the
book of Esther at the feast of Purim, is no doubt a very appropriate,
and may be a very profitable exercise. But it is confessedly of human
appointment. It is of the words of the scribes; the time and the mode
are altogether Rabbinical ordinances. Why, then, “are all the
remaining commandments of the law to give way to the reading of
the Megillah?” The priest was to neglect the service to which God
had appointed him, in order to obey a mere human institution. And
the Israelites to neglect the duties of love and charity, to fulfil a mere
ceremonial commandment. Here is a plain token that the oral law is
not from God, but is the offspring of human invention and
superstition. The human mind exalts ceremonies above moral duties.
God declares that all outward observances are secondary. “I desired
mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt
offerings.” (Hos. vi. 6.) “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good;
and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love
mercy, and to walk numbly with thy God?” (Mic. vi. 8.) And so the
New Testament says in the very same spirit, “The first of all the
commandments is, Hear O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord, and
thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, &c. This is the first
commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater
than these.” (Mark. xii. 29-31.) The oral law, on the contrary, tells us
that “all the commandments, except the burying of the dead, are to
give way to the reading of the Megillah,” to a mere ceremony; and
that not even of God’s appointment. God prefers mercy before the
sacrifices which He himself has instituted. The Talmud prefers a
human institution to all God’s commandments. A more striking
instance of genuine superstition, and a stronger proof of the human
origin of the oral law cannot be found.
The book of Esther appears to have been a peculiar favourite of the
Rabbies. The reading of it takes precedence of all other duties but
one, and is considered as obligatory, even upon the women, who are
declared exempt from the study of the law. It is true that it contains a
very notable warning for disobedient wives, and a striking instance of
the deliverance of Israel by the instrumentality of a woman; but when
we consider that the name of God does not occur once in the whole
book, and that the law contains the account of man’s creation and
fall, the ten commandments, the deliverance from Egypt, and all
those events of primary interest to women as well as men, it
becomes of some importance to consider why the women, who are
not bound to study the law of God, are bound to read the book of
Esther. The authors of the oral law appear to have attached
uncommon importance to this book, as appears from this
circumstance, and still more so from the following startling
declaration of Maimonides:—
, ‫כל ספרי הנביאים וכל הכתובים עתידן ליבטל לימות המשיח חוץ ממגלת אסתר‬
‫והרי היא קיימת כחמשה חומשי תורה וכהלכות של תורה שבעל פה שאינן לעולם‬
‫׃‬
“All the books of the prophets, and all the Hagiographa, except the
roll of Esther, will cease in the days of Messiah. But it is perpetual as
the five books of the written law, and the constitutions of the oral law,
which shall never cease.” (Hilchoth Megillah.) Some of the Rabbies
say that this is to be taken conditionally, “although they were all to
cease, yet this would not cease.” But this still attributes a decided
superiority to the book of Esther above all the other books. What
then is there in it, that gives this book such a peculiar favour, and
makes the history of Esther more important than that of the conquest
of Canaan, or of the glory of Solomon, or of the restoration of the
house of the Lord? Is there more devotion and piety to be found in it
than in the Psalms of David? Does it contain more wisdom than the
Proverbs of Solomon? Is there a sublimer flight of Divine poetry, a
more heavenly afflatus than in the visions of Isaiah? A more open
revelation of the mysteries of the Deity than is to be found in Job, or
Daniel, or Ezekiel? Why do the Rabbies pronounce it worthy of
preservation, whilst they contemplate without emotion the loss of all
the other books? We cannot possibly discover, unless it be that it
furnishes more gratification to the spirit of revenge so natural to all
the children of Adam, whether they be Jew or Gentile. To forgive is to
be like God—and God alone can teach forgiveness either
speculatively or practically. But the book of Esther contains an
account of the revenge which the Jews took upon their enemies, not
like the destruction of the Canaanites, fulfilling the commands of God
upon His enemies, but taking personal and individual revenge on
their own. And this very fact may be one reason why God did not
permit his most holy name to occur in the whole book—just as he did
not permit David to build him a temple, so he would not have his
name associated with deeds of personal revenge. But, however that
be, we can discover no other reason for the decided preference
which the oral law gives to the book of Esther. And we think that after
the specimens which we have already given of their spirit towards
idolaters we do them no injustice; especially as, in this particular
case, the oral law breathes this spirit aloud.
‫ ארורים כל‬, ‫ ארורה זרש ברוכה אסתר‬, ‫צריך שיאמר ארור המן ברוך מרדכי‬
‫עכו׳׳ם ברוכים כל ישראל ׃‬
“It is necessary to say, Cursed be Haman, Blessed be Mordecai,
Cursed be Zeresh, Blessed be Esther, Cursed be all idolaters,
Blessed be all Israel.” (Orach Chaiim, sec. 690.) Why this is
necessary, is not told us. It appears not to bring glory to God, nor
any blessing to man. Haman and Zeresh have long since passed
into eternity, and received from the just Judge the reward of their
deeds. Mordecai and Esther have in like manner appeared before
the God of Israel, and received according to their faith. To these,
then, the voice of human praise or reproach is as nothing. But to
curse a dead enemy, to pursue with unrelenting hatred those who
have already fallen into the hands of the living God, is certainly not a
Divine ordinance, and cannot be an acceptable act of worship in
poor sinners, who themselves stand so much in need of forgiveness.
To curse the dead is bad, but to curse the living is, in one sense, still
worse. “Cursed be all idolaters.” According to our calculation, there
are 600 millions of idolaters—according to the Jewish account, there
must be more. Why, then, should they be cursed? That will not
convert them from the error of their ways. It will not make them more
happy, either in this world or in the next. We are not aware, even if
God were to hear this execration and curse the idolatrous world, that
it would be productive of any blessing to Israel. Why make a day of
thanksgiving for mercies received an opportunity of invoking curses
upon the majority of mankind? The Word of God teaches a very
different petition for the heathen. “God, be merciful to us, and bless
us, and cause his face to shine upon us. That thy way may be known
upon earth, thy saving health among all nations. Let the people
praise thee, O God; yea, let all the people praise thee.” (Ps. lxvii.)
 No. VIII.
RABBINIC CONTEMPT FOR THE SONS OF NOAH.

The noblest inquiry, to which the mental powers can be directed, is,
Which religion comes from God? The most satisfactory mode of
conducting such an inquiry, independently of the external evidence,
is to compare the principles of one system with those of the other,
and both with an acknowledged standard, if such there be, and this
is what we are endeavouring to do in these papers. We by no means
wish to make the modern Jews responsible for the inventions of their
forefathers, but to show them that their traditional argument for
rejecting Christianity, and that is the example of the high priest and
the Sanhedrin, is of no force; inasmuch as these same persons, who
originally rejected Jesus of Nazareth, were in great and grievous
error in the fundamental principles of religion, whilst He who was
rejected taught the truth. To do this we must appeal to the oral law,
and discuss its merits. We have shown already that those persons
did not understand at least one half of the law; that their doctrines
were in the highest degree uncharitable. It has, however, been
replied, that the Talmud is more tolerant than the New Testament, for
it allows “that the pious of the nations of the world may be saved;”
whereas the latter asserts that “whosoever believeth not shall be
damned.” We must, therefore, inquire into the extent of toleration
and charity contained in that Talmudic sentence. The first step in this
inquiry, is to ascertain who are the persons intended in the
expression “The pious of the nations of the world.” The oral law tells
us, as quoted in No. 6, that the Israelites are commanded to compel
all that come into the world to receive the seven commandments of
the sons of Noah, and adds,
‫והמקבל אותם הוא הנקרא גר תושב בכל מקום ׃‬